Abstract

As a jobbing neuroscientist with day-to-day responsibilities for teaching and research, I am about as far away from ‘practical neurology’ as any writer of an editorial in this journal is ever likely to be. I don’t see patients, I do not have to think about diagnosis, to treat, nor to pass on bad news. My subjects live in the animal rooms of the laboratory, turn up for their appointments on time, and have invasive licensed procedures in which the experimental conditions are precisely matched except for the one variable in which I am interested. It would seem that clinical neurology and neuroscience are two quite different cultures. However, we are not like the two cultures of Arts and Science that F.R. Levis and C.P. Snow argued about two generations ago (Snow 1993; see also: http://www.datasync.com/~/pwilz/snow1.htm). We have in common a shared interest in the organ of the human body from