ABOVE: ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY
Bruce McEwen, a neuroendocrinologist at Rockefeller University, died January 2 after a brief illness. He was 81 years old.
McEwen is best known for his research on how stress hormones can reconfigure neural connections in the brain, according to a university statement. In 1968, McEwen and his colleagues discovered that the rat hippocampus is affected by the hormone cortisol, sparking further research into how hormones can enter the brain and affect mental functioning and mood. At the time, most scientists believed that the brain was not malleable after becoming fully developed, a line of thinking that McEwen’s research findings contradicted. In 1993, he coined the term allostatic load, which describes the physiological effects of chronic stress.
With his wife, Karen Bulloch, a Rockefeller professor, he studied how immune cells in the brain increase during a person’s lifespan and can contribute to neurodegenerative disease. He also researched how ...
