Biographical Memoirs Volume 65 (1994) / Chapter Skim
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16. Curt P. Richter
16. Curt P. Richter
Pages 310-321
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As an aclult, and right into his eighties, he was an excellent tennis player, challenging people half his age. He was also known to vault over the high pike fence around the Phipps Clinic when the gates were locked, leaving younger colleagues to climb over slowly anti carefully.
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the Psychiatry Department, Richter found a real benefactor in his pursuits of inquiry. Watson did not stay around to really witness Richter's progress, for within a short time he left Hopkins and Richter was able to take over his laboratory.
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In fact, rats kept under anesthesia for twenty-four or forty-eight hours maintained circadian cycles in phase on recovery from anesthesia. Throughout his career, Richter the tinkerer followed his childhood proclivities and found ingenious ways of measuring behavior: the widely used Richter tube for measuring fluid intake, the ubiquitous running wheel for measuring activity rhythms, new ways to measure sweating, salivation, and nest building.
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He influenced Richter and his studies on the psychobiology of homeostatic regulation. McCollum had shown how changes in the diet can provoke compensatory behavioral responses, a (lemonstration of Cannon's concept of "the w~sclom of the body." Studies had aIreacly been conducted by Clara Davis in the 1920s, in human infants, that suggested that nutritional balance could be maintained by self-selection of a diet from a variety of simple basic foods.
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That is, the hormone acted to conserve and redistribute sodium in the body, but also to generate the behavior of salt ingestion. Many subsequent investigators pursued this line of reasoning and used sodium hunger as a paradigmatic case of innate motivated behavior and as a basis for an analysis of the neural control of behavior.
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He used his data on salt hunger in rats to understand the abnormal salt appetite of a little boy. His success in studying biological clocks in rats lecl him to
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He also demonstrate<1 the release of the grasping reflex following damage to the frontal lobe in the monkey, sheclcling light on the strong grasp reflex of both human and monkey infants whose frontal lobe was not yet fully developed. Richter was also always on the alert to see clinical analogues for his experimental work on behavioral adaptations.
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Yet with extraordinary prescience, Morgan declicated his 1943 edition of Physiological Psychology to Richter as well as to Lashicy. Finally, Richter pioneered research into many different areas of behavior involved in nutrition, emotion, biological rhythms, ant!
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It was the tradition of Franklin through his influence on Charles Saunders Peirce that emphasized method and invention, common sense, experimentation, and strong ties to the biological sciences in the study of behavior. From within this tradition Richter enjoyed the pleasures of inquiry.
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118:91-92. Experimentally produced behavior reactions to food poisoning in wild and domesticated rats.
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