Dawes’ Contributions to Symposia and a Summing Up

Abstract

In addition to his scientific contributions per se, and helping to inspire the small army of leaders to be that came of age under his tutelage, Geoffrey Dawes had a special and amazing gift for synthesizing information and ideas. Many of his overviews of various issues were given as invited lectures, keynote addresses, and introductions to various proceedings and conferences. For instance, in what was to be the first of several symposia devoted to the “baffling problem” of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), held in 1963 in Seattle, WA (Wedgwood and Benditt 1965), with his background in physiology and pharmacology, Dawes brought valuable insights to the discussion. In his presentation on cardiovascular pulmonary reflexes, he emphasized the relation of his studies with asphyxia in newborn and young lambs to the enigma of SIDS. Additionally, in terms of casual mechanisms, he stressed the necessity to consider alternative hypotheses (Dawes 1965). A decade later at a Bethesda, MD, symposium devoted to this topic (Bosma and Showacre 1975), Dawes participated in the discussion of almost half of the formal presentations. In concluding comments, he challenged the participants on their many assumptions and the supposed “facts” presented; “I would be careful about this evidence,” he cautioned (Dawes 1975, p. 266). Importantly, Dawes formulated a number of ideas relating to SIDS and outlined research questions that required exploration (Dawes 1975). Many of these remain unanswered to the present day (Kinney and Thach 2009). Along this line the hippocampus is a key component of the forebrain-limbic network that modulates respiratory regulation via interactions with brainstem neuronal centers. A provocative study has reported that a marker of hippocampus dentate gyrus abnormality, food granule cell bilamination, was present in 41% (47 of 114) of SIDS newborns whereas this abnormality was apparent in only 8% (3 of 39) controls (Kinney et al. 2015). This may serve as a morphologic marker for underlying brain vulnerability.

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are to-day, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghost at cock-crow. This is the most familiar and certain fact about life, but it is also the most poetical…

(Trevelyan 1949, p. 13)