Editorial

In the Dorsal Column of this issue of Brain Terence Sejnowski reviews a 'scientific biography' of Warren McCulloch by Tara Abraham. McCulloch's contributions spanned such a broad range of scientific topics that it is easy to forget that he started as an experimental neurologist before venturing into neuropsychiatry, mathematical biology and cybernetics. He was influenced by John Hughlings Jackson, and early in his career he addressed mechanisms of seizure initiation and propagation. Later, in September 1949, he spoke at the inaugural meeting of the Ratio Club, arguably the crucible of the British cybernetics school, which took place in the basement of the nurses' home at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square (Husbands and Holland, 2012). Among the founding members of the Ratio Club were honorary or substantial clinical neurologists, neurophysiologists and psychiatrists. Club members continued to ratiocinate at the National Hospital for the first 2 years of its existence, although the link with clinical neuroscience became more tenuous with time. It disbanded in 1955 not long after the death of one of its most famous members, Alan Turing, who had already helped to launch computer science and artificial intelligence, stepchildren of cybernetics. That clinicians could find a common language with mathematicians and physicists may strike the modern reader as remarkable, but this was long before clinical practice became dominated by targets, protocols and checklists.

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