Bernard Tursky (1918–2012)

Psychophysiology, 51 (2014), 1059–1060. Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Printed in the USA. Copyright © 2014 Society for Psychophysiological Research DOI: 10.1111/psyp.12338 In Memoriam Bernard Tursky (1918–2012) LARRY D. JAMNER, Ph.D. Department of Psychology and Social Behavior University of California Irvine bs_bs_banner Psychophysiology and our Society lost one of its original greats when Bernard Tursky passed away on September 13, 2012 at the age of 93. Bernard Tursky was an academic trail blazer and pioneer extraordinaire. Raised in New York City, Bernard immigrated to the U.S. with his grandparents and brothers at the age of three. Circumstances demanded that he cease his formal education after the eighth grade in order to support his family. Bernie or “Profes- sor” as I affectionately referred to him represented as close an embodiment of the self-taught “Renaissance Man” I have ever met or will likely ever come across again. To enter Bernie’s office was to enter a veritable library of classic and contemporary texts, and reference manuals on topics such as electrical engineering, classic psychology, political science, medical sciences, physiology, psy- chiatry, systems theory, and mathematics. His academic career began as a technical engineer at MIT, and as his reputation grew as an ingenious developer of laboratory equipment and programming, he was recruited by the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Remarkably, Bernie was to become the only faculty member in the State University of New York system to hold the title of Full Professor in three separate departments; Political Science, Psychol- ogy, and Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Stony Brook Uni- versity. Bernie’s academic career was characterized by the use of elegant procedures, meticulous methods, and clever experimental designs to address fundamental scientific questions in areas ranging from human pain perception and clinical psychophysi- ology to political psychology. His work showed a fastidiousness not often seen today, and Bernie was, at the same time, a visionary. In 1965 David Shapiro convinced David McClelland to offer Bernie an appointment in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard where Bernie and David Shapiro built a state-of-the-art psychophysiology laboratory and together with Andrew Crider, and Gary Schwartz developed and taught what perhaps was the first seminar/lab courses devoted entirely to psychophysiological concepts, methods, and applications. Among the notable students who took the course or were involved in the course’s laboratory were Nancy Adler, Iris Bell, Richard Davidson, John Kabat-Zinn, and Alan Sirota. This training effort eventually spawned a NIH- sponsored summer training institute in Psychophysiology at Harvard Medical School that offered formal training to young scientists. It was at this 1972 summer institute that Bernie became acquainted with Milton Lodge a political scientist from SUNY Stony Brook who soon after convinced him to head a comprehen- sive behavioral research laboratory as a Professor of Political Science. Eventually, Bernie was to become Chair of the SUNY Stony Brook’s Department of Political Science, a position he held until his retirement in 1985. Bernie, like several of our Society’s founding members, designed his own experimental apparatus and created the equip- ment necessary to study human pain perception in a standardized fashion. This pioneering program of research conducted in collabo- ration with Peter Watson and Donald O’Connell focused on the development of a reliable laboratory pain stimulus delivery system in the form of a constant-current stimulator and the Tursky con- centric electrode capable of quantifying and precisely specifying the parameters of painful stimuli used in experimental pain studies. With his meticulous and elegant techniques Bernie systematically studied the electrical parameters necessary for stable repeated delivery of painful stimuli as well as the local and more general physiological responses associated with these stimuli. The devel- opment of the constant-current stimulator along with the Tursky concentric electrode represented, at the time, major methodological advances in the area of human pain perception. Parenthetically, one of the original constant-current stimulator units and concentric electrodes Bernie built remain in active use in my laboratory today and is affectionately known by my students as the “Dragon Lady.” With these tools in his armamentarium, Bernie went on to study psychophysiological aspects of pain including the role of attention and control, as well as culture, in pain perception. In what were to become seminal papers, Bernie and Richard Sternbach demon- strated substantial ethnic differences in pain thresholds/tolerance levels and psychophysiological pain responses. Another signifi- cant contribution of Bernie’s to the field of human pain research