Curt Richter: a life in the laboratory

Abstract

The pictures of my two mentors hang in my office. One is Jean Mayer, my thesis sponsor. The other is Curt Richter, whom I did not meet until after my thesis was complete. But more and more, as the years pass, I realize that Curt Richter has been my model for how to do science, how to be an inquirer. I consider Curt Richter to have been the greatest psychobiologist of the twentieth century. He epitomized the approach of finding "big phenomena" (as my colleague, Philip Teitelbaum, describes them), that is, large, striking effects, which he then explored. Over and over again, he discovered something really important, brought it into the laboratory, tamed it with his ingenuity, amazing engineering ability, and great hands, and shed light on something interesting to us all. Richter's nose for phenomena was his greatest asset. His style was to open scientists' eyes to something we had not appreciated and give us some ideas about how to investigate it. Then, in most cases, he was on to something else. This breadth is apparent from the very beginning of his career. "His first seven papers deal with determinants of spontaneous activity, biological clocks, endocrine control of behavior, the origin of the electrical resistance of the skin, brain control of the motor system, and a device to aid in the measurement of salivation. All these beginnings developed into lifelong interests. . . . The breadth of this total entry into the scientific literature is so great, that none of his first seven papers refer to any of the others!" (Rozin 1976a). Richter is the quintessential example of what Jay Schulkin calls "a laboratory state of mind." As Eliot Stellar described Richter, "It is hard to imagine the joy of scientific investigation unless you've witnessed it directly. To see curiosity and humbleness go hand in hand, to see unabashed enthusiasm for new ideas, to see excitement over little achievements that inevitably add up to a big picture, to see that weather-eye out for the new shape of understanding, all this is to see Curt Richter" (Stellar 1976, p. xi).There is very little big theory in the Curt Richter corpus, and not much fancy equipment. His striking effects did not require, and usually did not receive, summary statistics, let alone inferential statistics. He just came up with one winner after another. He understood how to use natural pathologies, reproduced in the laboratory, to illuminate the normal state of affairs. He worked seamlessly across physiological and behavioral analyses, always with an idea of how what he studied was adaptive in an evolutionary sense.And he worked steadily, and really hard. His career was uninterrupted by moves of his lab from one place to another. Richter did his thesis under John Watson at Johns Hopkins University and stayed there for his whole life. It is hard to imagine anyone more associated with Johns Hopkins.Richter's major theoretical contribution was the idea of behavioral homeostasis, and he provided a massive amount of evidence for it. He brought ideas about constancy of the int...