When Larry Goldstein was in high school, his biology class project was to study the brains of goldfish -- their memory and how they learn.
Goldstein is still studying the brain more than 30 years later.
Today, it's the human brain in his role as director the Duke Center for Cerebrovascular Disease in Durham, North Carolina, and the Duke Stroke Center.
But in high school in Wantagh, New York, a prosaic suburban community, Goldstein first needed a lab for his experiments.
"There was this old storeroom in the back of the classroom that was really dirty and disgusting, but I turned it into a lab," he recalled.
Once the tanks were up and running and the goldfish were swimming to and fro, he set the rig up so that there was light only on one side on the tanks.
"I wanted to train the fish to swim toward the light," he said. "So if they swam to other side they received a 'minor' shock. The fish learned pretty quickly to swim to the light."
But he didn't stop there.
In a foreshadowing of his future as a neurologist recognized worldwide as a stroke expert, Goldstein took his goldfish experiment one step further. He injected the fish with an anticholinergic drug obtained from New York University to determine whether the drug would affect the fish's ability to learn and remember.
He was conducting these high school experiments in the 1970s. Today, brain researchers agree that anticholinergic drugs can impair cognitive function. Common anticholinergic drugs are Detrol (tolterodine) and Ditropan (oxybutinin), which are used to treat overactive bladder.
Recalling his high school science project, Goldstein, 50, said he was sure even then that he wanted to pursue a career in medicine and that his goal would be study of the brain.
He attended Brandeis University as biology major and while there had the opportunity to work with Herman T. Epstein, Ph.D, a physicist who first reported that the brain grows in spurts and in humans those growth spurts correspond very nicely with the stages of cognitive development described by French psychologist Jean Piaget.
Goldstein said the opportunity to work with Epstein, which followed his memory experiments in high school biology, convinced him that it is important to "bring in interested young people while they are still high school or college students to introduce them to brain research."
