Howard Fields (neuroscientist)
Howard Lincoln Fields (born 1939) is an American neuroscientist and clinical neurologist with expertise in pain and in opioid pharmacology.  He is currently professor of neurology and physiology emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Biography. Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1939, Fields studied physiology at the University of Chicago (BS 1960). In 1965–1966, he received an MD and PhD in neuroscience from Stanford University. He did a medical internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York, then spent three years (1967-1970) as a research neurologist at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. From 1970 -1972, Fields trained at the Harvard neurology program at Boston City Hospital, in Massachusetts. He then joined the faculty of the Neurology and Physiology Departments at the University of California San Francisco where he collaborated with other neuroscientists including Jon Levine and Allan Basbaum. Research. His research on the nervous system has ranged from pain, opioid pharmacology and substance abuse to endogenous opioids in pain relief and reward. Fields was one of the UCSF pain management center founders. With his UCSF colleagues, Fields has made major contributions to understanding the neurobiology of pain, opioid analgesia and opioid reward, and to  the mechanistic understanding and treatment of neuropathic pain. His group with Allan Basbaum described a top-down pain modulating circuit that mediates opioid analgesia and exerts bidirectional control of pain. His group was the first to establish the clinical effectiveness of opioids for neuropathic pain. They also discovered that topical lidocaine was effective to reduce the pain of post-herpetic neuralgia. In other discoveries, Fields with Jon Levine discovered that placebo analgesia was mediated by endogenous opioids by demonstrating that it is blocked by the opioid antagonist naloxone. Later work by Fields and his colleagues led to the discovery of  neural mechanisms in the midbrain and striatum that contribute to opioid reward. Fields’ specialties include neurology, neuropharmacology and neuroscience.