Eugene Aserinsky

Eugene Aserinsky ( * 1921, † July 22, 1998 ) was an American sleep researcher and discoverer of REM sleep.

Life

Aserinsky studied at Brooklyn College, where he moved in medicine between social science, Spanish and Vorunterricht. He then began a dentist from the University of Maryland in Baltimore, but it was from 1943 to 1945. Than military service providing soldier in Britain, where he fumbled with explosives After his return he worked at the employment office in Baltimore, before he undertook with his GI Bill a start to study at the University of Chicago, this time in physiology. He was from 1949 a graduate student at Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago. He discovered around 1953 REM sleep. This was the subject of his doctoral dissertation (Eye movements in sleep). First, he noticed that only in children, in which, in contrast to adult REM sleep often begins immediately and the observed he used as a Elektrookulograph ( EOG) old discarded prototype precursor of a Elektroenzephalografen. His first test subject was his own eight- year-old son Armond. With Kleitman, he proved that these stages of sleep with rapid eye movement also corresponded to higher brain activity in the EEG and that these phases corresponded dream phases. Kleitman and Aserinsky published about 1953 in the journal Science. Both were assisted in their investigation by the graduate student William Dement, later a professor and director of the Sleep Research Center at Stanford University. After his dissertation in 1953 left Aserinsky, who felt badly treated by Kleitman, Chicago, and also investigated the next 15 years no longer sleep. Later he taught at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia ( where he received a professorship after 22 years ) and was professor at the Medical School of Marshall University in Huntington (West Virginia). In 1987 he retired.

He later lived in Escondido, California, and died north of San Diego in a car accident.