The Soriano Lectures at the World Congresses of Neurology were named for his contributions and lasting presence

Victor Soriano was born on Feb. 8, 1909, in the Isle of Rhodes. At the time, the Isle of Rhodes was under the possession of Turkey, and soon after of Italy. Victor was the second of five siblings. His parents were Félix Soriano and Catalina Junio, both Sephardic Jews. They emigrated to Uruguay when Victor was 9 months old. This explains why Victor considered himself Turkish, Italian, and Uruguayan.

Victor Soriano

Once in Uruguay, the Soriano family settled in its capital city, Montevideo, in the historical district, where Victor chose to live the rest of his life. His father, an efficient and respected tailor, soon became popular among the Jewish community. His income quickly increased, and he gained great respect, especially after founding the first Sephardic synagogue in the city.

Young Victor was a hard-working student who in 1925 was admitted to the school of medicine, from which he graduated in 1934. During his period as a medical student, he paid special attention to Prof. Americo Ricaldoni’s teachings of clinical neurology at the Hospital Maciel. Prof. Ricaldoni was the first academic neurologist in Uruguay. Due to his efforts, the Instituto de Neurología of Montevideo was founded in 1926, having Prof. Ricaldoni as its first director.

After graduating, Victor Soriano was appointed neurologist of the Instituto de Neurología in 1935. This was a challenging time for the institute, because of the absence of a leader after Prof. Ricaldoni’s death in 1928, scarcely one year after the inauguration of the new institute.

Two years later, the authorities finally appointed Prof. Alejandro Schroeder as Ricaldoni’s successor in 1937. Prof. Schroeder started a period of reconstruction with the help of the few remaining neurologists, Victor being one of them. In 1939, Victor was promoted to assistant neurologist. Simultaneously, he was invited to teach neurology at different medical clinics in the Hospital Maciel and the Orthopedical and Traumatological Institute. In 1943, he was appointed associate professor of medicine.

In 1939, Vlctor married Clara Benzecry (Clarita, as she was known). She was his wife and his efficient secretary as well and permanently encouraged him in all his activities, both social and medical. After Victor founded the Uruguayan Committee of Friends of the Weizmann Institute of Israel, it was Clarita who organized its meetings, which were held at the Sorianos’ home. Every Tuesday evening, she hosted scientific, literary, and musical events.

In 1945, Victor traveled to the United States as a Rockefeller fellow, staying at Yale University with John Farquhar Fulton, Sterling professor of physiology, who appointed him instructor of physiology. Fulton inspired in Victor a deep and lasting admiration. In 1947, as visiting investigator of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, he worked with Prof. Hiram Houston Merritt at the Montefiore Hospital of Columbia University. Since 1948, he attended with Clarita all of the meetings of the American Neurological Association (ANA). In 1950, he was named delegate for Uruguay to the Iberoamerican College of Neurologists. Victor and Clarita were regular attendees to the International Congresses of Neurology from the initial preparatory meeting in Lisbon in 1953 and the first official congress held in Brussels in 1957.

At the congress held in Rome in 1961, Earl Walker of Baltimore, Giuseppe Moruzzi of Pisa, and Victor of Montevideo paid tribute to the memory of John F. Fulton, who had died the previous year. At that meeting, Fulton’s friends and collaborators decided to organize the Fulton Society, and Victor was elected as permanent president. This society commended its president to organize a special symposium, every two years, simultaneously with the World Congress of Neurology and the ANA meeting, where selected leaders of neuroscience should give lectures on advances in nervous system research. The first of these symposia was held in Atlantic City in 1965 and continued for many decades, sponsored by the World Federation of Neurology (WFN) and the ANA and organized by Victor and Clarita.

In 1987, Victor and Clarita decided to sponsor a lectureship to be given at the ANA, after 40 years of consecutive attendance to its meetings. The lecture must be given by a member of the ANA. When asked in 1989 why they chose to sponsor a lectureship, the Sorianos answered: “When we first went to the United States in 1945, to stay with Prof. John F. Fulton and afterward with Prof. H. Houston Merritt, we enjoyed the most cordial and warm welcome everywhere, establishing lasting bonds of friendship with outstanding promising young doctors, who are now senior members of the American Neurological Association and prestigious professors. Thus, when I became a member of the American Neurological Association several decades ago, I returned since 1948 every year with the double reward of enjoying a very outstanding scientific level and seeing dear old friends. Little by little, we have regarded the ANA as a big family, to which we are united by warm affection. Sponsoring a lectureship to be given at the ANA Annual Meeting, we like to think that in future years the Sorianos will be linked to all of you, through a brilliant lecture delivered by an outstanding scientist.”

The WFN also has two related endowed lectures in every world congress of neurology. One is the Victor and Clara Soriano lecture and the second is the Fulton Symposium/Soriano lecture. At the most recent World Congress of Neurology in Kyoto in 2017, these lectures included “Grid Cells and the Medial-entorhinal Space Network” by Prof. E.I. Moser (Norway), “Defining the Future of Neurology – Japan, Asia and Oceania” by Prof. H. Mizusawa (Japan), and “Global Neurology Challenges and Way Forward” by Prof. and WFN President Raad Shakir (United Kingdom).

Victor was the author of more than 200 scientific publications in different medical journals, covering different aspects of medicine. In neurology, he preferred epilepsies, spinal cord compression, and peripheral nerve pathology. He gave lectures in several countries in America, Europe, and Asia. Many neurological societies accepted him as honorary member.

Apart from his chief interest in experimental and clinical neurology, he had many hobbies. Boxing and football were a part of his youth. He also engaged in sports journalism. In the attic of his home, he mounted an astronomic observatory provided with a powerful telescope, and he sought relaxation by watching the sky. On occasion, he invited schoolteachers and their pupils to watch the moon and the planets. During his last four decades, he devoted much of his time to medical journalism, publishing in the most important newspapers of Uruguay weekly columns on different subjects: sanitary education, innovations in medicine, historical aspects of medical practice, with the intention of popularizing and simplifying medical knowledge. He loved all kinds of music, instrumental and lyrical, but he was also an admirer of the typical music of Uruguay and Argentina and its poetry, being able to sing from beginning to end the most popular tangos.

Victor died in May 2005 and Clarita a few years later. In 2012, Soriano’s brother-in-law agreed with the National Academy of Medicine of Uruguay to sponsor the Victor and Clara Soriano Award for international research in medicine, endowed with (U.S.$)10,000. •

By Douglas J. Lanska, MD, MS, MSPH, FAAN

In an oral history interview for the American Academy of Neurology conducted April 27, 2017, at the Boston Convention Center, I spoke with Nobel laureate Stanley B. Prusiner, the only living neurologist to have won a Nobel Prize (Lanska and Klaffke, 2017, Lanska, 2017).

Prusiner was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 “for his discovery of Prions — a new biological principle of infection.” Here is an excerpt from that interview concerning how Prusiner created the term prion, which he introduced in a landmark paper in Science in 1982 (Prusiner 1982).

Prusiner: [In the fall of 1980,] I was with a friend of mine who was a professor at Harvard. This was [American chemist] Frank Westheimer, PhD (1912-2007). [He was receiving] an honorary professorship in the pharmacy school. He came to see me and [we] talked. I went over everything I was doing. He said, “Stan, this is really fantastic. You’ve discovered something really new, and you need to give it a name, and you need to give it a good name. You need to think about this name for a long time. A lot of work needs to go into this. Because, if you give it a crappy name, someone else will come along and give it another name, and they will end up with the lion’s share of the credit, but you will have done the work, and that’s not a good idea. This is what you’ve done with your life, and you need to make sure that you don’t screw it up. So you need to spend a lot of time on this.”

Stanley Prusiner

Lanska: Could you to talk about how you came up with the term?

Prusiner: OK. I’m happy to recite this… [I]t’s the spring of 1981, and I need to finish this paper [Prusiner 1982]. The only thing holding it up is the word, and I’m trying to figure out a word.
So I go through Latin dictionaries, because I knew — I still know — a lot of Latin. I’m not a scholar in it; that’s for sure. I don’t know any Greek. I don’t really know how to come up with a word. I want a word like exon. I thought that’s a great word. Where do I find somebody who can do that? I kept thinking of somebody at Berkeley [who] can help me, but then I didn’t even know who to talk to. I thought this is going to be just frivolous to go to Berkeley and try to find some professor of words who will help me.
Then, I said, “OK, I’ve got to come up with some rational approach to a word, just taking a bunch of letters, and where are these letters going to come from? Well, they’re going to come from words that have something to do … [with the responsible agent].” So I wrote out [the words] protein, infectious, and agent. I started with that. I got piaf out of that, because I wanted protein, and I wanted infectious, and then I wanted agent.

Lanska: You just kind of threw on an extra “f” for fun?

Prusiner: For infectious.

Lanska: Protein, infectious, agent…p-i-a. You added an “f.”

Prusiner: So you just underline the “f” in infectious, right? That’s where the letters all come from.
I always liked [French cabaret singer and songwriter] Édith Piaf [1915-1963; nee Édith Giovanna Gassion; she adopted her stage name, Piaf, from her nickname, which is French slang for sparrow]. Now, “sparrow” is announcing all of this, right? [Prusiner laughs.]
I then sent it to a friend of mine named Sidney Udenfriend (1918-2001), an American biochemist and pharmacologist who was running the Roche Institute in Molecular Biology. This was a fabulous place that was created by Roche to do basic science that would create drugs. Eventually, they shut it all down, because they never got one drug out of spending hundreds of millions of dollars over 20 years. He reads the paper, and he says, “Stan, this is an American discovery, not a French discovery. You don’t need a French word. You need another word. Go find another word.” So that was the end of piaf.
Short. You need something short. You need to have two vowels. Great words are words like virus. That’s a fabulous word. And quark [pronounced kwork] is a great word. Those are words that I think are just A+.
So I then throw out agent, because I don’t need agent. That’s totally non-specific, and I’m left with protein and infectious. Whenever I would go to a lecture, I would write out infectious across the top and protein on the side, or vice versa. Then, I’d just pick letters randomly. I didn’t get anywhere until one day. I’d probably stumbled across the same word 10 times and never picking it out: p-r-i-o-n. I read it, and I say, “This is prion.” I could have pronounced it pry-on, but I pronounced it pree-on. Then, I said, “I’m going to write p-r-e-e-o-n as the pronunciation in parentheses.”
I leave this defunct faculty club that was now a sandwich shop across the street, and I walk upstairs. I look in my Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, because there are no computers. I find a bird with a sawtooth beak.

Lanska: A whalebird.

Prusiner: Right. And I said, “Well, you know, this really doesn’t matter. Lots of words have more than one meaning. There’ll be two pronunciations. If I’m right, this will be the No.1 definition, and the bird will continue to live on in oblivion, because no one is interested in prions [pry-ons]. I’ve never heard of a prion [pry-on]. It’s a petrel that lives in the south, the Southern Ocean [Antarctic Ocean].”
It’s not worth worrying about the bird. I said, “There’ll be a little crap from some of my competitors who will say, ‘That’s a bird.’” But I said, “It doesn’t matter.” So that’s where it came from. It had ion, so it looked like it was something highly basic. An ion really gets right down to the essence. And it was short. It had two syllables. It was going to be OK.

Lanska: You wrote in your book, though, that one of the reviewers of your paper objected, that the name had unfortunate echoes of the author’s name, Prusiner ions (Prusiner 2014, pp. 90-91).

Prusiner: Yes. That was pretty clever, [but] there was so much vitriol in the rest of the review.

Lanska: Now, of course, proteinaceous infectious gets you proin rather than prion…

Prusiner: Right, which is like loin.

Lanska: Which has kind of a funny sound to it, of course, no matter how you pronounce it. So you made another, little flexible change in that, just to give it a more catchy flavor, I think. Is that fair?

Prusiner: Yes. Proin is not a good word.

Lanska: But proteinaceous infectious as an acronym would get you that, right?

Prusiner: Yes.

Lanska: A lot of people didn’t like the term.

Prusiner: Yes.

Lanska: There was a lot of backlash. Why do you think there was so much animosity to that term?

Prusiner: If you read what other people have said, they didn’t like it, because essentially I took over the field by putting my imprimatur on the field prematurely, because I didn’t have enough information to come up with a word. That really is what I should have done was call it a Gibbs or a Gajdusek, [after NIH researchers C. Joseph Gibbs, PhD (1924-2001) and D. Carleton Gajdusek, MD (1923-2008), who first demonstrated the experimental transmission of kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to chimpanzees in the period from 1966-1968 (Gajdusek et al, 1966, 1968; Gibbs et al 1967)] or a Gajdusek and a Gibbs, or a Gibbs and a Gajdusek, or something like that, or a Dickinson [after British veterinary geneticist and scrapie researcher Alan Dickinson, PhD (1930-2017)]. Of course, this was nonsense from my point of view.
I did exactly what Frank Westheimer told me to do. The result was exactly what Westheimer wanted to have happen, which was to get a good word and not have somebody else take over. They had a lot of time. I was the new guy on the block. But they never could figure out anything about what was truly going on. They didn’t have a way of doing something, or they weren’t clever enough, or they weren’t sufficient showmen to figure out where all of this was going to go. But Westheimer saw it and called it completely.

Lanska: I think they were stuck in one little framework.

Prusiner: Yes.

Lanska: And they struggled to keep fiddling with “unconventional virus” [or] “slow virus.”

Prusiner: They had their own words, that’s true, but they were really dumb. “Unconventional virus” is as dumb as it gets.
There’s that great quote that’s in [my memoir] from [scrapie researcher] Iain Pattison [of the British Agricultural Research Council’s Compton Research Institute], in which he says:

“The fourth decade of my association with scrapie ended in 1978, with the causal agent still obscure, and virologists as adamant as ever that theirs was the only worthwhile point of view. To explain findings that did not fit with a virus hypothesis, they rechristened the causal agent an ‘unconventional virus.’ Use of this ingenious cover-up made ‘virus’ meaningless — for is not a cottage an unconventional castle?” (Pattison, 1988) •

References:

• Anonymous. The scientific marketplace. Nature Materials 2012;11:259.
• Anonymous. What Does ‘Quark’ Have to Do with Finnegans Wake? How a word used by James Joyce became the name for an elementary particle of matter. Merriam-Webster, 2017. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/quark [Accessed 12-12-17].
• Gajdusek DC, Gibbs CJ, Alpers M. Experimental transmission of a Kuru-like syndrome to chimpanzees. Nature. 1966;209(5025):794-796.
• Gajdusek DC, Gibbs CJ Jr, Alpers M. Transmission and passage of experimental “kuru” to chimpanzees. Science. 1967;155(3759):212-214.
• Gell-Mann M. A schematic model of baryons and mesons. Physics Letters. 1964;8(3):214-215.
• Gell-Mann M. The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995:180
• Gibbs CJ Jr, Gajdusek DC, Asher DM, Alpers MP, Beck E, Daniel PM, Matthews WB. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (spongiform encephalopathy): transmission to the chimpanzee. Science. 1968;161(3839):388-389.
• Lanska DJ, Klaffke L. Stanley Prusiner, MD, FAAN. American Academy of Neurology Oral History Archive Private Interview. 69th Annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, Boston, Massachusetts; April 27, 2017.
• Lanska DJ. Stanley Prusiner, MD, FAAN. American Academy of Neurology Oral History Archive Public Interview. 69th Annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, Boston, Massachusetts; April 27, 2017.
• Pattison IH. Fifty years with scrapie: a personal reminiscence. Vet Rec 1988;123:661-666.
• Prusiner SB. Novel proteinaceous infectious particles cause scrapie. Science 1982;216:136-144.
• Prusiner SB. Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions—A New Biological Principle of Disease. Yale University Press, 2014.
• Zweig G. An SU(3) model for strong interaction symmetry and its breaking. (CERN Report No.8182/TH.401. 1964a.
• Zweig G. An SU(3) model for strong interaction symmetry and its breaking: II. CERN Report No.8419/TH.412. 1964b.

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Douglas S. Lanska is associate chief of staff for education at the VA Medical Center, in Tomah, Wisconsin. He is also professor of neurology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, Wisconsin, and professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, Wisconsion and the chair of the History and Archives Committee of the American Academy of Neurology.

The next Exam of the European Board of Neurology (EBN) will take place on Friday, June 15, 2018 at the EAN congress site in Lisbon.

Prof. Wolfgang Grisold from Vienna successfully started this annual event in 2009. This year, we celebrate the 10th examination.

Every year, the number of participants increases. We receive a lot of mostly positive feedback from our candidates, which makes it possible to improve the exam continuously. Many young neurologists consider taking this exam to aid them while preparing for the written tests and writing their contributions for the oral exams.

Candidates at the European Board Examination in Amsterdam.

Participating in the EBN exam is not merely a way of showing success in retrieving information accumulated during training and reading literature, but more than that a demonstration of the ability of sound reasoning, presenting insight and working with accessible knowledge. Candidates are allowed to use external reference sources and prepare work at home that will be judged – and can be modified after personal feedback – before they come up for the real exam.

They can update and expand their knowledge and abilities, take part in a unique academic experience, and get an additional sign of excellence. Thus, they show their commitment for life-long learning. Although the EBN exam has no legislation until now, the title “fellow of the European Board of Neurology” (which does not coincide with “fellow of the EAN”) may enhance the candidate’s possibilities to work in other countries within and outside Europe.
For the next years, the collaboration between EBN and EAN will be intensified in a great way. Using more technical possibilities (as provided by the Swedish Company Orzone) will allow us to extend our questions to imaging, signal analysis, and clinical judgment with the help of movies.
Candidates who are members of EAN’s Resident and Research Fellow Section for at least one year now get a considerable reduction.

More information can be found at www.uems-neuroboard.org.

We sincerely hope to get more European candidates, not only junior neurologists, but also those who are already practicing. •

Prof. Jan Kuks is the chair of the EBN examination committee, and works at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands.

The World Federation of Neurology is pleased to invite bids to host the World Congress of Neurology (WCN) in 2023 from national member societies in the Americas.

If your national society would like to be a candidate to host WCN 2023, please write to the WFN Headquarters Office at the address below to express your preliminary interest by July 31, 2018.

You will be sent an application form to complete and return by Sept. 18. All applications will be treated in confidence and will be reviewed by the WFN to draw up a short list of possible venues. Those that are short-listed will be notified by mid-December 2018, and a site visit by WFN officers to evaluate the proposed program and facilities on offer will take place in the ensuing three months. A report and recommendation will then be submitted to the Council of Delegates meeting during the WCN 2019 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where the final vote will occur.

The WFN looks forward to hearing from any member neurological society that wishes to be considered as the host of WCN 2023. •