Twenty Researchers, One Meeting: Founding the Society for Neuroscience

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On June 16, 1969, twenty researchers gathered at the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, DC, and became the founding members of the Society for Neuroscience. The meeting, chaired by the psychologist Neal Miller of Rockefeller University, reviewed a proposed constitution and bylaws for a new organization built around a deliberately interdisciplinary premise: membership was open to any qualified researcher in North America with a sincere interest in an interdisciplinary approach to the brain and behavior, not to any single existing department or specialty. Edward Perl was named acting president and Louise Marshall acting secretary-treasurer. Growth was immediate: within six months membership reached five hundred, drawn from fields as different as biochemistry and clinical psychology, and six local chapters had already formed. That founding pattern, crossing freely between laboratory research and clinical fields such as neurology and psychiatry, is why neuroscience is recorded on this atlas as a distinct clinical and translational field rather than simply another name for neurology.