Personal Sketch

My interest in rhythmic aspects of behavior began in the mid 1960's as a graduate student and research assistant in biophysics in the laboratory of Dr. Robert O. Becker, MD, Professor of Orthopedic Surgery, Upstate Medical Center, Syracuse, N.Y. Dr. Becker was a brilliant scientist, nominated for the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on the electrical control system of the body. I spent three years in his laboratory and was author on a paper with him entitled, "Photoelectric effects in human bone" (Nature, 1964, 206, 2325- 2328). In his laboratory I learned to record direct current (d.c.) potentials and EEG recordings on sleeping small animals, such as salamanders. I then began recording d.c. cross-brain electrical changes on his patients in the operating rooms during surgery as they went in and out of anesthesia. But more fascinating to me than the bone research was other work that he had done. Along with a physicist and clinical psychologist, he had analyzed data demonstrating a relationship between 11-year sunspot cycles and increases in admissions to psychiatric hospitals. My reading led me to the work of biology Professor Frank A. Brown, Jr., and his students who had demonstrated tidal and lunar rhythms in such disparate organisms as carrots, potatoes, clams, and horseshoe crabs, even when they were not near any seashore. Fascinating! I completed my Masters Degree in Physiological Psychology, under the mentorship of Dr. Matthew J. Wayner, director of the Brain Research Institute at Syracuse University.

Encouraged by Dr. Wayner, I began a Ph.D. program at the University of Virginia under the mentorship of Dr. Frank W. Finger, who along with his students was studying behavioral rhythms including lunar rhythms in the feeding behavior of rats. Dr. Finger already was a highly respected researcher on the general activity in animals, and had been President of Division 2 of APA, Experimental Psychology, and was at that time Vice President of the Psychology Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But when I met him he was just beginning his understanding of the new sub-specialty of biological rhythms. So he and I were essentially on the ground-floor. As I would find a rhythms journal reference he also wanted a copy; as I bought a proceedings book about rhythms, he asked me to purchase one for him. So we learned about biological rhythms together. I was really getting into the effects of earth's tidal and lunar rhythms on physiology and behavior as demonstrated by Dr. Frank Brown.

By chance one day I saw a seminar to be presented at the U.Va's medical school about relatively constant internally generated human biological rhythms and told my mentor about it. He said that it sounded interested but since I intended to go and he could not, would I take note for him? After the talk I asked a question, telling the speaker that I was very interested in the study of earth and lunar rhythm effects on behavior. The speaker commanded me to come to the front of the auditorium! He grilled me and lectured me about what I did not know about the internal biological rhythms. Essentially he swept me into his world of internal rhythms research, invited me to that evening's reception for him at his host's home, left me with some of his research articles, promised he would call me as soon as he got back to home. Whew! That was my first encounter with the imposing and very convincing Professor Franz Halberg of the University of Minnesota Medical School's Biological Rhythms Laboratory. True to his word he called me, invited me to use his laboratory's facilities for any data analysis and to visit as soon as possible. Overwhelmed? Quite! I did visit his laboratory and was graciously received as only Prof. Halberg could entertain.

Returning to UVa, my mentor and I began learning about internally generated biological rhythms as well. The upshot is that for my dissertation research I proposed to test the then current idea that sleep-wakefulness was more of a conditioned habit than a biologically driven internally fixed behavior. I synchronized female rats to a 27-hour day and then mated them with male rats on the same schedule. Twelve pregnant rats remained on the 27-hour day of 13 hours darkness and 14 hours light until their offspring were 21 days old. Twelve bred females were maintained on the normal 24 hour day. Maintaining both sets of offspring on their mothers' schedules, I then constructed 12 experimental and 12 control matched litter-mate groups of three each and tested them at three different ages (30, 60, and 90 days) for retention of their respective day length. None of the experimental animals retained their life-long 27-hour period! I analyzed my nearly 300,000 data points in Dr. Halberg's laboratory using at that time recently constructed circadian period computer programs funded by the National Science Foundation. Using the old punch-card system took me 30 minutes to analyze each set of data from the 72 rats. After 36-hours straight of data analysis I boarded the plane and went home! The data clearly showed that the daily 24-hour sleep/wake cycle was not a habit, but an internally fixed rhythm, as current genetic research has confirmed. (As a post-script, I collected an equal amount of supplemental data from the same rats. Unable to face the daunting task of another 36-hour analysis, I did not analyze them until 20 years later with the help of a Penn State psychology graduate student. He, with more modern computers, completed the same analysis using a SAS program in less than 3 minutes!)

From the time of its inception in the late 1930s, the originally founded International Society for the Study of Biological Rhythms has been confused with the pseudo-science of "biorhythms."In an attempt to eliminate the confusion Dr. Halberg was successful in 1971 to convince the society's renaming to the International Chronobiology Society. No longer was there any confusion. Now the problem became, "what's chronobiology?" As Prof. Halberg (considered the "father" of chronobiology) simply put it, chronobiology is: A science objectively quantifying and investigating mechanisms of biologic time structure, including rhythmic manifestations of life."

Since my Ph.D. in 1971, when I presented my dissertation data at the name-changing society conference, I have been studying rhythmic aspects of behavior, both internally and externally generated rhythms. In the late 70's I felt a need to collect what was known about behavior rhythms. With a colleague, R. Curtis Graeber, (Col., U.S. Army retired) we organized the Wilhelm Wundt 100th Anniversary Symposium on Chronopsychology to commemorate the founding of the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig Germany. From it was published in 1982 the book "Rhythmic Aspects of Behavior." The chapters were written by the symposium participants who were most of the leading behavioral rhythms scientists at that time. Now every good introductory psychology textbook includes a section about circadian rhythms, the near-24 hour rhythms of nearly all organisms, the term "circadian" coined by Prof. Halberg. In 1988 I wrote about the near 30-day multiple rhythms that underlay the length of pregnancy of most terrestrial mammals and its relationship to the lunar illumination cycle. In 1993 I further developed an existing morningness/eveningness scale into the Basic Language Morningness (BALM) scale, to measure individual preferences for morning and evening activities for use by the general public.

Since that time my students and I have been studying various other aspects of both externally influenced and internally generated rhythms that influence behavior. My interest now is in applying this rhythmic information for more effective living as my research is a part of my wellness psychology emphasis.