Many of you have read my post from a few months ago entitled “My second father and my second brother”. “My second brother” is a bit tongue-in-cheek, because I had three biological brothers before Juarez Ricardo came along. But Juarez and I were inseparable for two years as members of Dr. Walle Nauta’s lab at MIT, and I came to think of him as my brother.

I LEARN TO DRIVE A STICK

It was impossible for me to write about my parents’ struggles with a standard shift without recalling my own experience, with Juarez of course, in the same vein. We had signed up for our first scientific meeting, the American Association of Anatomists, to be held in Louisville, Kentucky. We could have flown of course, but Juarez, hungry for knowledge about this country (he was from Brazil), wanted to “see the Midwest”. In our relationship I was the active one and he relatively passive (or contemplative, to be more flattering), and so his plan was that I drive his Toyota Corolla wagon while he smoked his pipe and admired the scenic American midwest from the safety of the passenger seat. The only problem with this scenario was that his car had a standard shift, which I did not know how to drive. We made a plan to meet at a large MIT parking lot at 6 PM, when it would be relatively empty, and give me a crash course on driving a stick.

When the time came, things at first did not go well. Whenever I let out the clutch the car would jerk uncontrollably, and both of our heads jerk forward and back against our traumatized necks. After several episodes like this, I stopped and took stock of the situation. Juarez looked very disappointed that his plan was failing. I studied my strategy and guessed that I was not releasing the clutch at the right level. Since I had no idea what the right level was, I decided to let it out incredibly slowly throughout its excursion, and see what happened.

It worked. About a third of the way from the bottom the clutch engaged smoothly and we began to cruise around the lot at about ten mph. It was a miracle! Juarez took the pipe out of his mouth. “Oh great, Ed! Now I can see the Midwest!!”

THE KENTUCKY DERBY

Although my memory is hazy, I believe we made the journey in one long day. Our destination was the Downtown Holiday Inn. With no knowledge of Louisville hotels, I had decided that a Holiday Inn seemed safe, and had a choice between Midtown and Downtown. I figured that Downtown was where the action was, and rented a room there.

On the way to our hotel we went along the river (Mississippi?) and saw signs proclaiming “Home of the Kentucky Derby”. By sheer happenstance, the Kentucky Derby was being held that very weekend! We had lucked out, we thought. We passed the Midtown Holiday Inn, which looked clean and cheery. We looked forward to settling into our hotel.

As we headed toward our hotel, the neighborhood began to deteriorate. Strange dark people inhabited the street corners along with women dressed like Derby jockeys, in bright red short-shorts. Even my innocent brain recognized them as hookers. “Do you think those men at the corner are hobos?” Juarez asked. For some unknown reason “hobo” had become one of Juarez’ favorite words. “We just call them ‘bums'”, I answered testily.

The Downtown Holiday Inn was a dump: dirty, sooty, with the feel of cockroaches (although I must admit I didn’t actually see any). We went to our room. I was totally spooked, while Juarez was happy as a clam. “Ed, I think I’m going to walk down to the corner store and get some tobacco. I’m almost out.” “Are you sure you want to do that?” ” Oh, yes, don’t worry I’ll be fine.”

Twenty minutes later he returned with the tobacco. “How’d it go?” I asked. “Ed, in Brazil we have an expression, “I am holding my a**hole in my hands”. “What does it mean?” “It means I am incredibly scared!” Juarez had been accosted by both hookers and “hobos” during his brief encounter with the neighborhood and his feeling of well-being was gone.

As it turned out, over the next few days we got used to our grungy little hotel (it looked better in the daylight) and even made a habit of greeting the hobo at the door and giving him a quarter, for which he was truly grateful. We presented our paper at the conference (Juarez, being first author, read the presentation without incident), and we enjoyed the ambience of the Derby. After three days in this academic fantasy world, we headed home.

All I remember about the return trip was fields of wheat, seemingly endless, rippling in the midwestern wind. Why we hadn’t noticed them on the trip in I will never know, except that our excitement about the journey may have hindered our actual appreciation of our surroundings.

THE PRE-STAINING ERA

When we started to work in the lab, there was already in place a factory-like routine followed by Bob, a grad student, and Miles, a post-doc (post doctoral fellow). We would perform brain injections on white lab rats, then “sacrifice” them and process the brains for microscopic examination. Juarez and I had to learn every step of the process, which we did in a few months.

The culmination of the process was staining the brain sections, which we had sliced thin on a microtome and mounted onto glass slides. The sections were put through a series of rectangular glass dishes not unlike a photographic developing setup. The result was a set of slides stained a pale green, which we examined through the microscope and saw–nothing! The stain was called a Nissl stain and was meant to show nerve cell bodies. We saw nothing of the kind, only odd squiggles which we correctly determined to be artifacts.

What made it even more frustrating was that everyone in the lab would look at our slides and say “nice stain!”, even Dr. Nauta! What they meant was that there was no heavy background color to interfere with the appreciation of our experimental label. Meanwhile, Juarez and I pored over our rat brain atlas looking for indentations and small blood vessels which might provide some clue to what the hell we were looking at!

It was a sunny Saturday when I was driving on Mem(orial) Drive right near the lab, when it hit me! No one had changed the staining setup in many months. Maybe if I refreshed the stain something would show up on our slides! I hung a U-turn at the next turnaround and headed for the lab. Within an hour I had discarded the tired green solutions and replaced them with bright blue ones.

When I put the newly-stained slides through the setup, the result was dramatic. Through the microscope’s optics thousands of oblong nerve cell bodies jumped out at me, forming patterns which delineated different clusters or nuclei. It was just like in the text books! I called Juarez, and immediately he drove in from his home in Newton.

Puffing on his pipe, he sat at the microscope and beheld the magic sight: neurons galore! He was incredibly excited. “Oh, Ed, this is truly the end of the pre-staining era!”

Ironically, on Monday everyone in the lab looked at our slides and said the same thing: “nice stain!”

(laughing when he saw cars lined up at a stoplight)

WE GO TO DISNEYLAND

In his fascination with all things American, it was only a matter of time before we went to Disneyland. Not Disney World, but the original Disneyland. By happenstance the Society for Neuroscience was meeting in Anaheim one year, and, being within a mile or so of Disneyland, we absolutely had to go.

At that time (the end of the 70s) Disneyland was a mess. All of the Disney money had gone into Disney World, and Disneyland had been crippled by a long strike. Three quarters of it was nonfunctional, including many of the favorite rides. It was almost a ghost town, with very few kids. (!) Nevertheless, Juarez was entranced by the rundown place, smoking his pipe and ambling through the different rides and pavilions.

My only goal at Disneyland was to be drawn by one of the Disney cartoonists. So at one of the booths we found one of them drawing effortlessly on large transparent cels. Juarez and I posed for caricatures, which the fellow whipped off in less than a minute. Mine showed me carrying a tennis racket (I was wearing a tennis shirt), and Juarez’ showed him smoking his pipe, with the pipe smoke holding a dollar sign. I realized that he looked like a rich kid, well-dressed in a light suit (with no tie). We were delighted.

Later I altered Juarez’ caricature by pasting a small headshot of Dr. Nauta where the dollar sign was. We were both obsessed with Nauta.

OUR BRAIN RESEARCH PAPER

In 1977 Juarez completed his two-year stint as a post-doc. His wife Adelaide had returned to Sao Paulo the year before with their two daughters, Helena and Tatiana. She was a board-certified internist who had been reluctant to come to the US in the first place, and spent the entire year studying to re-take the difficult board exam which she had already just passed! (Her hiatus for one year nullified her first successful effort.) She was not successful at learning English and felt isolated for the entire year, only socializing with a few Brazilian friends.

Juarez’ newfound “bachelor” status allowed him to concentrate 100% on our research efforts, which at this point comprised an attempt to publish a remarkable finding which we had made using the latest tract-tracing technology. I had done most of the painstaking manual labor which led to the finding, with Juarez smoking his pipe and chatting with me while I worked. However, when it came time to decide the authorship of the paper, Juarez told me that he needed to be first author in order to advance his career. I reluctantly agreed when he pointed out to me that I was still a student, and therefore not expected to first-author a major paper. He also vowed to do an exhaustive literature review to emphasize the physiological significance of our finding, which included him essentially moving into the Countway Medical Library, something which was soon made unnecessary by the arrival of the Internet.

Juarez had signed onto the project in an organic way, since he and I were inseparable for most of the workday. We went to the F & T diner in Kendall Square every day for lunch, and ordered what the extroverted short order cook Dominic called a “quarter pounder” before McDonald’s came out with theirs. I always ordered a Western sandwich. We ate, drank, and slept the brain. I even looked at the sky once and saw a serrated pattern in the clouds, and had the thought “Well, God didn’t do a very good job cutting that section…) We were obsessed.

Dr. Nauta did not put his name on the paper despite the fact that he had originally assigned me the project and monitored my progress every week. He did not explain this decision, but we realized that he probably did not want the second author on the paper to be buried. So the paper was Ricardo and Koh. Since the last author was usually the person who ran the research group, people at meetings were surprised that I was Koh. They expected a white-haired man who looked like Dr. Nauta.

Our paper was entitled “Anatomical evidence of direct projections from the nucleus of the solitary tract to the hypothalamus, amygdala, and other forebrain structures in the rat.” Because of Juarez’ extensive literature review, it exceeded the maximum length allowed by Brain Research, and we were given the choice between cutting out the review or paying $4,000 in “page charges”. When we told Dr. Nauta about the issue, he did not hesitate. “We will pay the charges!” At my last visit to ResearchGate, the 1978 paper had been referenced over 1300 times in the literature, with new citations every week.

SAD NEWS

After we submitted the paper, I had a case of “post-partum depression” and took the summer off (without asking anyone permission) and played tennis and drank Tanqueray and tonics at the Boston Tennis Club. (See tennis posts.) Juarez returned to Sao Paulo and continued to write up the findings which were emanating from our extensive histological experiments. We corresponded by airmail, which took about a week. We met once at one of the Neuroscience meetings, where he was presenting a paper. He was well-dressed and looked well. He had his own lab in Brazil, and came to be known as a “little Nauta” with his encyclopedic knowledge of the literature and his soft-spoken intensity.

The following year, I heard that Juarez had died. He had developed a fulminant case of rheumatoid arthritis which had attacked his organ systems and led to a rapid decline. He was at oldest 35 years old.

There was no Internet or e-mail at the time, and so I got this news about six months after the fact. I did not have his home address or phone number (I had written him at his work address at the University of Sao Paulo), and could not even write Adelaide a letter of condolence. As a result, I never had the opportunity to mourn his loss.

Perhaps this is the reason that these memories are so fresh in my mind. I never buried them. God had blessed me with this wonderful friendship, and I needed to say goodbye. Perhaps writing about them is my way of honoring Juarez Ricardo, my dear, dear friend, my second brother.