Gerhard

Today I found out that Gerhard is dead. The human race is a bit meaner and stupider for that.

I met Gerhard about 17 years ago. He was a friend and an inspiration. I never tire of talking about him. In fact I told someone a Gerhard story yesterday. When we returned to Austin this summer I thought of looking him up. But I decided to wait till after the start of the fall semester because Gerhard is usually off teaching or galavanting around Europe over summer.

It isn't the Gerhard died today. Or yesterday. That happened almost 6 months ago. I found out about it today. My old boss (and Gerhard's too) Michael sent me an email this afternoon alerting me to Gerhard's Wikipedia page (I didn't know he had one) - it said that he had died on March 26 of this year. About an hour later I was at his home crying on Marion's shoulder.

Gerhard was about the most wonderful person I knew. He was cheerful, funny, enthusiastic, caring. In the entire time I knew him I never ever heard him be mean or nasty. He had no ego at all. He couldn't suffer idiots or administrators but even there he was gentle and sweet in his criticism.

Gerhard was perhaps the smartest and most successful person I knew. He founded a hospital in India for WHO in 1948 where my mother would end up starting her medical career a decade later. In 1950 he co-invented succinylcholine by testing it on himself - still one of the most frequently used neuromuscular blockers in emergency rooms today.  He built computers at MIT to solve medical problems before Artificial Intelligence was a term. He ended up running one of the top university medical schools in the country. Then he retired and a couple of years later ended up at Motorola. When Moto disbanded our research group he joined the faculty at UT in the biomed department. Marion said that he sent his last paper in for publication three days before he died. He was trying to figure out how consciousness and thought work, how your brain creates vivid thoughts from billions of synaptic connections. Till the end he was learning new programming languages and mathematical modeling techniques, and applying ideas from quantum physics and physical chemistry to neuroscience.

Gerhard was one of the youngest people I knew. I first met him when he was in his seventies and he died when he was 90. But he had the curiosity of a child and the drive to learn new things and the  spirit to venture into the unknown. He always acted like a kid in a candy store. His candy was new ideas. He could not sit still or be calm as long as there were new problems to solve

Vivian and Evan - you met him briefly. You will have to learn about him from me instead of getting to know the real deal. I won't say Rest in Peace my friend, because wherever you are you are shaking things up.