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Giles Brindley

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British physiologist (born 1926)

Giles Brindley (1952)

Giles Skey Brindley, FRS (born 30 April 1926) is a British physiologist, musicologist and composer, known for his contributions to the physiology of the retina and colour vision, and treatment of erectile dysfunction.

Medical career

Brindley is perhaps best known for an unusual scientific presentation at the 1983 Las Vegas meeting of the American Urological Association, where he removed his pants to show the audience his chemically induced erection and invited them to inspect it closely. He had injected phenoxybenzamine (using one mL of a mixture of 5 mg of Phenoxybenzamine in 10 mL of saline) into his penis in his hotel room before the presentation.

Brindley is also a pioneer in visual prosthetics, developing one of the first visual prostheses in the 1960s. The device was tested on four blind patients, giving them some basic visual sensation, but given the technology of the day further development was impractical. He also developed sacral anterior root stimulators for bladder control in paraplegic patients.

Trained in Cambridge and London Hospital, he saw service in the RAF before taking up academic appointments first in Cambridge and then at the University of London, authoring more than 100 scientific papers in a variety of subjects. He was doctoral advisor to David Marr who later developed computational theories of vision that had great impact in the neuroscience of vision and computer vision, and post-doctoral adviser to Duco Hamasaki, a professor at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at the University of Miami School of Medicine.

Brindley was, for a while, a member of the Ratio Club with Alan Turing, Horace Barlow, John Westcott and others from various fields, who met between 1949 and 1952 to discuss brain mechanisms, new technology and related issues.

Brindley gave the 1986 Ferrier Lecture, a triennial Royal Society prize lectureship.

Music

Brindley invented a musical instrument in the 1960s, the 'logical bassoon', an electronically controlled version of the bassoon. It was easier to play than a normal bassoon, but was never marketed.

Brindley also composed music for wind instruments, including Variations on a Theme by Schoenberg and The Watermans Daughter .

Selected publications

  • Physiology of the Retina and Visual Pathway. 2nd edition. Edward Arnold, London, 1970.

References

  1. Chase, Victor (2006). Shattered Nerves. Baltimore, USA: The Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 55. ISBN 978-0-8018-8514-3.
  2. Brindley, G.S. Physiology of the Retina and Visual Pathway 2nd Ed. London: Edward Arnold 1970
  3. "A Description of the Pioneering Work That Led to the First Approved Agents for ED: Giles Brindley, the Needle, and the Penis (Phenoxybenzamine)". Key Clinical Trials in Erectile Dysfunction. Springer. 2007. pp. 4–7. doi:10.1007/978-1-84628-428-1_2. ISBN 978-1-84628-427-4.
  4. "Allan Showalter Blog | Your SUPER-powered WP Engine Blog". Archived from the original on 28 April 2011. Retrieved 13 January 2009.
  5. Laurence Klotz (November 2005). "How (not) to communicate new scientific information: a memoir of the famous Brindley lecture". British Journal of Urology International. 96 (7): 956–957. doi:10.1111/j.1464-410X.2005.05797.x. PMID 16225508.
  6. Brindley, G. S.; Lewin, W. S. (1 May 1968). "The sensations produced by electrical stimulation of the visual cortex". The Journal of Physiology. 196 (2): 479–493. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.1968.sp008519. PMC 1351724. PMID 4871047. Archived from the original on 7 December 2007. Retrieved 9 January 2012.
  7. Brindley GS, Polkey CE, Rushton DN. Sacral anterior root stimulators for bladder control in paraplegia. Paraplegia. 1982 Dec;20(6):365-81.
  8. Holland, Owen; Husbands, Phil (15 March 2011). "The origins of British cybernetics: the Ratio Club". Kybernetes. 40: 110–123. doi:10.1108/03684921111117951. Retrieved 20 October 2019 – via www.emerald.com.
  9. G.S. Brindley: 'The Ferrier Lecture, 1986: The Actions of Parasympathetic and Sympathetic Nerves in Human Micturition, Erection and Seminal Emission, and their Restoration in Paraplegic Patients by Implanted Electrical Stimulators'. In: Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, Vol. 235, No. 1279 (Nov. 22, 1988), pp. 111-120
  10. Brindley GS (March 1968),″The Logical Bassoon″, Galpin Society Journal, Vol 21.
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