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Related: About this forumThe science of sleeplessness.
BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT
MARCH 11, 2013
Nathaniel Kleitman, known as the father of modern sleep research, was born in 1895 in Bessarabianow Moldovaand spent much of his youth on the run. First, pogroms drove him to Palestine; then the First World War chased him to the United States. At the age of twenty, he landed in New York penniless; by twenty-eight, hed worked his way through City College and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Soon after, he joined the faculty there. An early sponsor of Kleitmans sleep research was the Wander Company, which manufactured Ovaltine and hoped to promote it as a remedy for insomnia.
Until Kleitman came along, sleep was, as one commentator has put it, a huge blind spot in the science of physiology. No one bothered to study it because it was defined by what it wasntsleep was a state of not being awake and, at the same time, of not being comatose or dead. (Its unclear what exactly attracted Kleitman to this academically marginal topic, but it has been suggested that it fitted with his own marginalized background.)
In one of Kleitmans first experiments, he kept half a dozen young men awake for days at a stretch, then ran them through a battery of physical and psychological tests. Frequently, he used himself as a subject. As a participant in the sleep-deprivation experiment, Kleitman stayed awake longer than anyone elsea hundred and fifteen hours straight. At one point, exhausted and apparently hallucinating, he declared, apropos of nothing in particular, It is because they are against the system. (Asked what he meant, he said hed been under the impression that he was having a heated argument with the observer on the subject of labor unions.) In another self-administered experiment, Kleitman spent six weeks underground, in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, trying to live according to a twenty-eight-hour day. (He found that he could not.)
In the early nineteen-fifties, Kleitmans research was sponsored in part by Swift, the meatpacking company, which was interested in finding out whether feeding babies a high-protein diet would make them sleep more soundly. It was at this point that heor, really, one of his graduate studentsstumbled onto a great discovery. Casting around for a dissertation topic, the student, Eugene Aserinsky, decided to hook sleepers up to an early version of an electroencephalogram machine, which scribbled across half a mile of paper each night. In the process, Aserinsky noticed that several times each night the sleepers went through periods when their eyes darted wildly back and forth. Kleitman insisted that the experiment be repeated yet again, this time on his daughter, Esther. In 1953, he and Aserinsky introduced the world to rapid eye movement, or rem sleep. Another of Kleitmans graduate students, William C. Dement, now a professor of psychiatry at the Stanford medical school, has described this as the year that the study of sleep became a true scientific field.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/03/11/130311fa_fact_kolbert
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(3,496 posts)Guilleminot suggested something that pretty much ruined my life but whatever...