Blue plaque review series: Thomas Graham Brown: Before his time

Thomas Graham Brown made a seminal discovery, published in 1911 while he was a Carnegie Fellow in the University of Liverpool laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Charles S. Sherrington. Working in cats, he showed that rhythmic 'voluntary' behaviour, such as stepping and, by inference, walking, does not result from a chain of reflex events, but that there are rhythmic circuits (oscillators) in the spinal cord that can produce a programme of alternating antagonistic muscular contractions and, by inference, motor neuron activities that underlie rhythmic stepping. This was the first definitive demonstration of what today we call a central pattern generator for an 'important' non-automatic rhythmic behaviour, and it should have rocked the foundations of the Sherringtonian view of the nervous system, but it didn't. Like the biblical 'Vox clamantis in deserto' (Isaiah 40:3, Biblia Scara Vulgata), Brown was largely ignored by his contemporaries, including Sherrington, only to be rediscovered starting in the 1960s. The legacy of Thomas Graham Brown is not only his scientific contribution that ultimately impelled the field of motor pattern generation forwards but also an object lesson in how powerful voices can drown out the dissenters. It remains as a lasting imprint on our science.