Sleep Research [antikvár]

Opening RemarksA. PletscherLadies and gentlemen, welcome to Roche Basle. It is a great pleasure and honour for me to open this symposium on sleep research, and I thank all ofyou who have kindly agreed to participate in this event.Sleep is certainly one of the most fascinating phenomena in biology. Sleep disturbances due to various causes are amongst the most common disorders of the central nervous system of man. There-fore, this phenomenon has attracted the curiosity of scientists for centuries and research on the physiology and pathophysiology of sleep can look back on a very long tradition. The progress in sleep research of the last 50 years has been especially remarkable.I was fortunate enough to be a student of W. R. Hess in Zürich, who was awarded the Nobel prize for his basic studies on new con-cepts of the role of the central nervous system in regulating auto-nomic fuctions, including sleep. The success of Rudolf Hess was not based only on his ingenious electrophysiological techniques, which were anyway rather primitive for today's standards, but alsó on his meticulous observations of the animals' behaviour.Since Hess's classical work, electrophysiological techniques have developed impressively and for clinical studies the application of the EEG has been most fruitful. Since the late 'forties of this century another aspect of sleep research has developed, namely the bio-chemistry, neurophysiology and anatomy of neurohumoral trans-mitters. Through the classical work of Dale, Loewy, Euler and others, acetylcholine and norepinephrine were found to be mediators of the peripheral autonomic functions. These substances, together with 5-hydroxytryptamine, serotonin, were then alsó discovered to occur in the brain with a specific distribution, to be synthesized, stored, released and metabolized in this complex organ.