Obituary for Professor Hiroshi Shibasaki (2022)

Professor Hiroshi Shibasaki was born in 1939 in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. He finished his MD course in 1964 at Kyushu University School of Medicine (MD license in 1965) and then obtained his PhD from Kyushu University School of Medicine in 1969. He did most of a residency in Neurology at the University of Minnesota Hospital when A. B. Baker was Chief of Neurology. Prof. Shibasaki noted that during that stay, he learned electroencephalography (EEG) from Fernando Torres and this became his favorite tool for the rest of his life. He also recounted that he did not finish his residency because Prof. Kuroiwa, who was his chief in Kyushu, wanted him back in Japan and was fearful that if Prof. Shibasaki finished his residency in the United States, he might never return to Japan. He did return to Kyushu where he became an Assistant Professor of Neurology. He had a very important sabbatical as a Visiting Scientist at the Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London with Prof. Martin Halliday from 1978 to 1979. There, he did his pioneering studies of voluntary movement and myoclonus using back-averaging of EEG. Returning to Japan in 1979, he was appointed serially as Lecturer, Department of Neurology, Kyushu University to 1981, Associate Professor of Neurology at Saga Medical School to 1988, Chief, Department of Neurodegenerative Diseases, National Institute of Neuroscience, National Center of Neurology, Tokyo to 1989, and then Founding Professor and Chairman, Department of Brain Pathophysiology, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine to 2003. Prof. Shibasaki was simultaneously appointed Chairman of the Department of Neurology, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine from 1999 to 2003. From 2003 to 2005, he was a Fogarty Scholar at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health (NIH) where he joined his colleague, Dr. Mark Hallett, in his Human Motor Control Section. In 2006, he returned to Japan, where he continued to consult and teach clinical neurology and participate with some of his former students in various research projects. He died on June 9, 2022. Prof. Shibasaki was active in professional societies. He served as Secretary of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology from 1997 to 2001, President from 2006 to 2010, and Past-President from 2010 to 2014. He was President of the Japanese Society of Clinical Neurophysiology from 2001 to 2005. He served on the Editorial Board of Brain from 1997 to 2004 and was an Associate Editor of Clinical Neurophysiology from 2003 to 2006. He was elected as an Honorary Member of the German Society of Clinical Neurophysiology in 2003, of the Movement Disorder Society in 2004, the Japanese Society of Neurology and French Society of Neurology in 2005, and the American Neurological Association in 2013. He gave the Pierre Gloor Award Lecture at the American Clinical Neurophysiology Society in 2015 and the C. David Marsden Award Lecture at the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society in 2020. Prof. Shibasaki was a superb scientist. He performed many studies to gain insight into the pathophysiology of movement disorders. One of his greatest contributions to the field in his early career was the development of a novel EEG technique, termed jerk-locked averaging. This method was used to detect small EEG abnormalities preceding myoclonic jerks in patients with myoclonus including progressive myoclonic epilepsy and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, providing proof that these patients had myoclonus of the cortical origin. He went on studying mainly myoclonus in the 1980s. Using jerk-locked averaging and other EEG technology, his group found that some patients with seemingly familial essential tremor actually had cortical reflex myoclonus (cortical tremor). This disorder is now known as benign adult familial myoclonus epilepsy. He also studied the physiology of reflex myoclonus sensitive to visual stimuli (photic cortical reflex myoclonus). Prof. Shibasaki always took on challenges. When he was invited to come to Kyoto University in 1990, he started to build a new laboratory that integrated different non-invasive brain imaging methods including EEG, magnetoencephalography, transcranial magnetic stimulation, single photon emission tomography, positron emission tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging. To make this possible, he invited neuroradiologists to his laboratory as staff members because imaging was not his expertise. Many neurologists, neurosurgeons, psychiatrists, pediatricians, radiologists, and neuroscientists gathered at his laboratory to learn those neuroimaging technologies emerging at that time. Many of them have become professors in neurology, neurosurgery, or neuroscience departments (eg, Hidenao Fukuyama, Akio Ikeda, Takashi Nagamine, Norihiro Sadato, Manabu Honda, Nobuhiro Mikuni, Tatsuya Mima, Takeharu Kunieda, Riki Matsumoto, Nobukatsu Sawamoto, and Takashi Hanakawa). There, he led many studies about the neural mechanisms of motor control in healthy people and about the abnormalities of those mechanisms in patients with movement disorders including myoclonus, dystonia, functional movement disorder, and Parkinson's disease. He also made important discoveries about human motor control using subdural electrodes for epilepsy surgery. With work in this area, he made an important friendship and collaboration with Prof Hans Luders. His laboratory was so successful that in 2000, it developed into the Human Brain Research Center, Kyoto University School of Medicine, which has continued to be recognized as a leading neuroimaging facility in Japan. Prof. Shibasaki was an excellent mentor. Throughout his entire career, he passionately trained neurologists. Neurology residents learned how to perform neurological examinations from his rounds at Kyoto University Hospital in the 1990 to 2000s. He wrote a very popular book in Japanese on how to do a neurologic examination. He decided to translate this work into English and asked Dr. Mark Hallett to help him. This was also successful, and they were finishing the second edition of the book when he died. He had a large family with three children and nine grandchildren. His wife, Shinobu, is also a physician, and the two of them were devoted to each other. He was always a gentleman, slightly formal, polite, and friendly. Everyone loved him—a giant in Neurology and Clinical Neurophysiology and a fine person. His life benefited everyone who knew him.