Grant: Operating Grant - Priority Announcement: Ethics

This history of medicine research project investigates some important cultural influences on modern neuroscience with a focus on institutional, organizational and researcher migration issues. The research follows an integrated group biographical, institution and network historiographical approach, while investigating biographical, conceptual and organizational information on émigré neuroscientists, who were forced to leave their home countries in the 1930s and 1940s and came to North America due to the political changes in Central Europe. The historical project also analyzes the role of international networks that facilitated the forced migration of this group of approximately 600 neurologists, psychiatrists and other medical researchers and clinicians, as well as their integration into North American neuroscience centers, the reciprocal changes of these research settings and the ways, how they were locally modified. By applying a cultural view to neuroscience history, the project gives new insights into the nature of progressive and regressive factors of individual forms of research organization, the development of institutional models and their impact on modern neuroscience, thus contributing to the advancement of ELSI knowledge in medicine and providing historical information for use among respective stakeholders (researchers, administrators, organizational leaders) in the Canadian and International Neurosciences. This project investigates some major institutional settings and patterns of migration and adaptation in North American neuroscience between 1910 (when the first interdisciplinary neuroscience centres emerged in Europe) and 1970 (when the Society of Neuroscience had its first US meeting), in order to determine its receptiveness to external impulses and its permeability for foreign researchers and physicians.