Now luckily, oxytocin is produced both in the brain and in the blood, so I could do this experiment without learning neurosurgery.

Now I trained in medicine in India, and after that I chose psychiatry as my specialty, much to the dismay of my mother and all my family members who kind of thought neurosurgery would be a more respectable option for their brilliant son.

More recently, Harvey Cushing, who really developed neurosurgery as we know it, who changed it from a field of medicine that had a majority of deaths resulting from surgery to one in which there was a hopeful outlook, he was very conscious that he was not always going to do the right thing.

With Henry Brem, now the chief of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, we thought we could use these polymers to deliver drugs locally in the treatment of brain cancer. But I had to raise money for this project, so I wrote grant applications to government agencies that were reviewed by other professors.

CALGARY When Harvey Cushing and William Bovie introduced electrocautery (which uses a high frequency current to seal blood vessels or make incisions) in 1926, their innovation transformed neurosurgery. Given the precision required to operate on an organ as delicate as the brain, the convergence of mechanical technologies with the art of surgery catalyzed progress in the field.

The merging of human surgical experience with machines and computerized technologies is driving neurosurgical advancement, with robotic surgery serving as an important model of the benefits of the human machine interface. Add virtual reality to the equation and the future of neurosurgery takes shape a future in which the discipline is elevated to new levels of excellence.