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Gerd Walter Christian Sommerhoff OBE (for services to education) was born on 13th February 1915, in Wiesbaden, Germany and died on 28th April 2002, in Cambridge, England, United Kingdom. He was a pioneer & lifelong advancer of theoretical neuroscience and a noted humanist.

A great-grandson of the German composers Robert Schumann and his wife Clara, he was living in England at the outset of the Second World War. Being a foreign national, he blamelessly suffered more than two years in an internment camp in Canada before decompressing back in England, where he took up a post teaching science at the Dragon School in Oxford. While there, he laid the foundation for Educational Technology (for which he was honoured by our late queen) using boxes of numbered cards, containing questions, answers, tutorial material, or descriptions of experiments, on a variety of different subjects. He became a Research Fellow in Systems Theory at University College London, and presented science programmes for the BBC from 1960 to 1962, before being recruited to teach technology in Sevenoaks School in 1963 by headmaster Kim Taylor. In 1984, he retired from teaching and moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was well-regarded.

Some of his students were Tim Hunt, Alan Macfarlane, John Paul Morrison, and Richard Veryard.

Early life and family

Gerd and his twin sister Gerda were born in Wiesbaden, Germany, to Elizabeth Ruher and Walter Georg Sommerhoff (a wealthy banker who was born in New York to Elise Schumann, the second child of Robert & Clara Schumann). The Sommerhoff family resided in Haarlem, Netherlands, until the loss of their fortune in the Wall Street Crash and the ensuing possibly suicidal death of their father. The two younger children moved to Ryde on the Isle of Wight in 1931 with their mother Elizabeth Sommerhoff (when she remarried, to Major Bernard Francis Anne Vernon-Harcourt) while their elder brother, Walter Hans Sommerhoff, emigrated to Santiago, in Chile.

Gerd then studied engineering at Zurich Polytechnic (now ETH Zurich) and philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University. Being (an anti-Nazi) German in England, he then found himself needlessly corralled onto a ship westwards over the Atlantic Ocean, where a loud horn that sounded in the lower decks deafened him permanently in one ear to higher pitch notes. From 1939 to 1942, he was interned in Canada where, bunked up with physicist Klaus Fuchs, he patriotically tried to warn British authorities (tragically ignorant to all but reports of Fascism) about his roommate's then-overt Communist sympathies, prior to his recruitment into Tube Alloys then the Manhattan Project and Fuch's betrayal of its nuclear secrets to Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, which enabled all the dangers of the Cold War.

Gerda, being female, was exempted from internment as an enemy alien, and became a model (for Vogue magazine), a sculptor and a photographer, then emigrated (as eldest sibling Walter had done) to Santiago, in Chile, where she married Juan Eduardo Subercaseaux and had five children.

Works

• 1950: Analytical Biology
• 1974: Logic of the Living Brain
• 1990: Life, Brain and Consciousness
• 1994: An Account of consciousness in physical and functional terms: A target for research in the neurosciences. Integrative Physiology and Behavioral Science. With Karl F. MacDorman.
• 1996: In and Out of Consciousness. The intimate history of a search for certainties.
• 2001: Understanding Consciousness – its function and brain processes.

Retirement and eventual death

In early October 1996, Gerd visited the University Societies Fair at Kelsey Kerridge sports hall in Cambridge, where he smilingly declined recruitment to a water-pistolling game of Killer, which would that Michaelmas Term entertain 128 students. Instead he invited its fun-loving Umpire to dine with him in the University Centre, beginning a lifelong age-gap friendship of mutual psychic benefit. Oftentimes afterwards, they would luncheon together at the nearby Garden Moat House hotel, overlooking the River Cam. In the summer of 2001, he gladly let the younger man and his girlfriend drive him to the east coast, for a perfect day out on Aldeburgh's blue flag beach. He lived alone, but cherished his friends. In early 2002, on the morning of his 87th birthday, he reached up into a wall cupboard and tragically stumbled backwards against the corner of a table, injuring his lower back. (In hindsight, all such sharp corners should be rounded off with a sanding disk, in the homes of our elderly friends.) The young couple arrived from Shropshire thinking to celebrate his birthday with him, but hearing his lament, they quickly called for a doctor, who opined that sepsis was a danger. Of three different levels of analgesia offered to him, Gerd chose the medium, since the strongest would shorten his life. Knowing sepsis resulting from his injury would likely accelerate his death, he declined to consider cryonics, saying he preferred to live whatever might remain of his lifespan only around those generations he already knew, despite his philosophy of scientific humanism lamenting his consciousness would be bound for eternal oblivion. After a month of homecare, he had to enter a hospital run by Bupa, into which he had long paid healthcare premiums, with little to no prior claim upon their service. They quickly transferred him to the excellent local NHS hospital, Addenbrooke's, where over several weeks spanning Easter, he was able to talk fondly with all his friends, until death sadly came in late April. His well-attended funeral was held at Cambridge Crematorium on 7th May, and his ashes were later buried by many devotees among the roots of a sapling planted at Sevenoaks School, in honour of its former teacher.

Presumption of Innocence

The presumption of innocence is a principle, enshrined in English Law, essential to make us civilised.

Our British war hero Alan Turing was punished brutally for homosexuality and driven to suicide, despite later being voted the Greatest Person of the Twentieth Century. Like him, Gerd came to feel in young adulthood that he was gay, but lived during decades when such healthy sexuality was unjustly criminalised, and therefore had to be concealed, limiting his chance to find a life-partner. Nevertheless, with close friends of all sexuality, he opened up this part of himself, while never imposing it. Though gentlemanly, he enjoyed humour and sharing anecdotes, so there had been scope for misinterpretation of his comedy by puritans and people lacking self-confidence.

The only vocal critic of Gerd has an eponymous website which discusses his own autism. He similarly describes the unnamed claimant (possibly himself in anonymity) as living with schizoid personality & Asperger's Syndrome, and nebulously refers to six critics who have never come forward. His typo-ridden website lambasts many people. We might speculate he fell out with Gerd, and has sought to amplify his obloquy eightfold, with nobody bothering to verify any other critic exists.

References

1. Richard Brown Baker family papers
2. Intellectual Autobiography by Richard Sorabji. In Metaphysics, Soul, and Ethics in Ancient Thought: Themes from the Work of Richard Sorabji, By Ricardo Salles. Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-19-926130-7.
3. J. Paul Morrison's autobiography. Accessed 16 June 2009.
4. Brian Scragg, Sevenoaks School, A History (1993)
5. Autobiography of Nobel Prizewinner Tim Hunt
6. J. Paul Morrison's autobiography. Accessed 7 July 2016.
7. Gerd Sommerhoff, Obituary, The Times, Friday 17 May 2002
8. Sommerhoff, Gerd; MacDorman, Karl (1994). "An account of consciousness in physical and functional terms: A target for research in the neurosciences". Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science. 29 (2): 151–181. doi:10.1007/BF02691012. PMID 7947330. S2CID 17193883.
9. His autobiography and its biographical addendum will be uploaded here within days.
10. Sage Publishers

Further reading

• "Obituary - Gerd Sommerhoff (1905-2002)". Kybernetes. 34 (5). 1 June 2005. doi:10.1108/k.2005.06734eab.007. ISSN 0368-492X.

External links

• Google Groups thread

• 1915 births
• 2002 deaths
• German neuroscientists
• German humanists
• Systems scientists
• Schoolteachers from Kent
• Academics of University College London
• Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge
• People from Wiesbaden
• People interned during World War II