Notes on the History of In Vitro Hippocampal Electrophysiology and LTP: Personal Reflections

This essay describes the development of the in vitro hippocampal slice technique and my small contributions to it and to influencing Roger Nicoll's early interests in the hippocampus and LTP. My Ph.D. work at Harvard with Timothy Teyler was on field potential studies of synaptic plasticity, including LTP, in the rat in vitro hippocampal slice. As a postdoc, I introduced the slice preparation to Roger Nicoll's lab at UCSF but failed to interest him in LTP. Here I explain how Nicoll's scientific philosophy both motivated me to develop our first submersion slice chamber and kept him from investigating LTP for nearly a decade. Finally, I recount the history of the name "LTP."