UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE
Peter Huttenlocher, a giant in the field of brain development, died August 15 of pneumonia and complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was 82. Huttenlocher’s innovative approach to counting billions of synapses in the brain led to the discovery in the late 1970s that brain cell connections proliferate rapidly during an infant’s first year, and then undergo progressive “pruning” throughout life —a finding that revolutionized the way scientists, physicians, and parents view brain development.
“It would be hard to think of another discovery that is so central to our understanding of pediatric neurology,” Huttenlocher’s friend and colleague Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist at Columbia University, said in a statement.
Huttenlocher, a professor emeritus and former section chief of pediatric neurology at the University of Chicago ...
