Émigré neurophysiologists' situated knowledge economies and their roles in forming international cultures of scientific excellence

Abstract

This article investigates the scientific performance and impact of Jewish and politically oppositional émigré German-speaking neurophysiologists from Nazi-occupied Europe since the 1930s. The massive loss of nearly 30% of all academic psychiatrists and neurologists in Germany between 1933 and 1945 also shattered the basis of German-speaking neuroscientific research. A focus will be laid here on the contingency of situated knowledge economies in Central Europe, the UK and North America, as well as their roles in the formation of international cultures of scientific excellence in the forced migration process. While examining excellent émigré laboratory research, the intriguing biographies of three Nobel Prize-winning neurophysiologists––Otto Loewi (1873–1961; from Germany/Austria to the USA), Bernard Katz (1911–2003; from Germany to the UK) and Eric Kandel (b. 1929; from Austria to the USA)—can tell us considerably more about the appraisal of medico-scientific knowledge through an epistemic lens representing world history along explicit regional knowledge economies. This article examines some of the more intricate scientific practices and professional patterns of determining academic excellence related to situated knowledge communities in the contemporary brain sciences.