You can order the DVD from the Academy for $15 (including GST and postage)
Professor Jonathan Stone was interviewed in 1996 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge.
The following summary of Stone's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract covers Stone's involvement in the parallel processing concept of visual processing. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Jonathan Stone was born in 1942 in Auckland, New Zealand and moved to Australia with his parents when he was a baby. He received a Bachelor of Medical Science from the University of Sydney in 1963 and a PhD in 1966. For his doctoral research Stone developed a new way of looking at the retina of the eye. He discovered how to peel the retina off the eye and lay it flat instead of the traditional procedure of cutting it up into pieces.
After a year as a visiting lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Stone did post-doctoral research at the Institute of Biomedical Research in Chicago with Sir John Eccles, and then spent a year in Munich at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry.
Stone returned to Australia in 1970 to take up a position as a research fellow at the John Curtin School of Medical research. Here he continued his research on the retina, discovering a new class of cell in the retina and developing an explanation of how the retina sends information to the brain. By tracing ganglion cells in the retina to the brain, Stone showed that different types of ganglia went to different areas of the brain. This led to the parallel processing concept of visual processing – that three basic types of information (colour, shape and motion) are separated in the retina and sent through parallel pathways to the visual cortex.
In 1976 Stone moved to the School of Anatomy at the University of New South Wales initially as a senior lecturer, then as an associate professor (1978-85). He became head of the school and took up a Personal Chair in Anatomy in 1985. During his years at the University of New South Wales, Stone's research interests shifted from the study of parallel processing to the development of the brain. His next appointment was as Challis Professor of Anatomy at the University of Sydney (1987-2003). Here he worked on the interaction of neuroglial cells during the stresses of birth, particularly focusing on types of blindness that result from the degeneration of photoreceptor cells. Stone was appointed Director of the Research School of Biological Sciences at the Australian National University in 2003. At the ANU his research concerns the stability and degeneration of the central nervous system, including dementia and a group of inherited eye diseases that affect the retina.
Stone was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1984 and was Secretary (Biological Sciences) between 1986 and 1990. His interest in the population debate began when he was Secretary, and in 1991 he delivered the Australian Foundation for Science lecture entitled The environmental crisis: People, plague and the problem of charity. His 1998 paper Empty or full: The debate over the population of Australia was presented to the 1998 Malthus Bicentenary Conference (National Academies Forum).
When Eccles left Chicago, you went to one of his first-rank people.
I was offered a position in another lab in Buffalo, where Eccles went, but I’d dragged my family round enough. I stayed with Rudolfo Llinas' group and worked with John Freeman, a young American who showed me how brilliance and good hands could take you a long way very fast. I greatly enjoyed that year with John, going into intracellular recording using classical electrical stimulation techniques, which I then took back to Canberra.
Via Munich.
Yes. I had a year in Munich, partly to see Germany but also because I was lucky to get a position there in the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry. The head of the lab was Otto Creutzfeldt, a very distinguished neuroscientist whose father’s name is attached to the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Otto later headed a group in Göttingen, and Bert Sakmann and Erwin Neher, who got the Nobel Prize a few years ago, were his protégés. He too supported me and left me to my own devices while I brought together the techniques I had learnt with Eccles with the work I had done with Bishop.
From Eccles I had learnt to watch for the unexpected in what you see down the microscope or on the oscilloscope screen. And that’s what happened in the transition from Germany back to Peter Bishop’s group. When I worked in Germany on a very detailed study of conduction velocity of cells with different receptive field types, I saw variations that no-one had described. Hanging out on the end of the traces were cells that didn’t fit into the two major types. I put them aside…
And that’s where you stumbled across the W-cells?
Yes. Briefly, when you stimulate along the visual pathway – as Bishop had shown 20 years before – you get two groups of fibres turning up at very precise moments on the oscilloscope screen. When I started to work on their receptive field properties, I saw a very occasional scattering of cells which I guessed to be small neurones that others hadn’t seen in the past 20 years because of microelectrode technology. I went back in, using the glass electrode technology that I’d learnt with Eccles, and then they started to turn up, one in five. When I did look at the receptive fields they were quite different, and I realised that I was dealing with a class of cells that hadn’t been recognised before.
Were these patterns and populations of cells with very precise influences that turn them on or switch them off?
That’s right. And that was the excitement that came out of Hartline’s work. Buried small in my doctoral thesis had been a chapter in which I gave – when I look back at it – an incomplete description of receptive fields that hadn’t ever been seen before. It was very exciting at the time and it got published in Science, but they were not easy to record and I couldn’t do more with it. It stayed somewhere in my memory traces, however, and when I reached back to it I found that although it was a bit untidy it looked better with passing years.
I had five fruitful years with Peter’s group. He put me in a lab, with tremendous support. I got technical support equipment; I didn’t have to write a grant, just go. The first story that we pulled out was this new class of cell in the retina. Having absorbed that, then I turned to how the retina sent information to the brain. The ganglion cells are the output cells of the retina, and in your eye and mine there are a million of them, each has its own private line into the rest of the brain. Among the ganglion cells there are clearly different cells doing different things. The retina is not just a light processor but is specialised, through these different output cells, to pull different things – movement, shape, colour in the primates – out of the visual image and channel them into different parts of the brain. The idea driving me was that when you then traced them in the brain you would find they went to different areas, and this worked.
I mustn’t fail to acknowledge the superb work done by the others working in the same area in Canberra. We drove the idea right through to the visual cortex. With colleagues who made tremendous input to it – Peter Hoffmann, Bogdan Dreher – we argued that these ganglion cell classes are reaching the cortex without mixing and are driving some of the variation in the cortex which American workers had interpreted as serial processing. They had seen the same variation but had thought the information was being processed in a hierarchical manner. One of the papers we wrote together was on hierarchical and parallel visual processing. It contained large areas of analysis that I still am pleased to read.
That driving idea of parallel processing was resisted by the Americans. They had done such a lovely constructive job; they broke open so much, and were rightly rewarded with great honours. But on this…
You were not yet 30 and you were pushing against big, established ideas.
Yes, and was stupidly fearless about the matter. But I must say that Peter Bishop understood it: he saw what was happening and his philosophy was that out of the ferment, which he welcomed, would come the hard testing, the discarding of what was wrong, and so he gave us great intellectual freedom. I like to think that he found that a very productive period in his lab. I believe those ideas are now part of the mainstream. My father used to say in his own field, ‘There comes a stage, son, where not only don’t they remember the details of the battles, they forget that there ever was a battle.’ I think we’ve got to that stage now with the parallel processing concept of visual processing.
I haven’t done the cortical work since then, but we have seen evidence that different areas of visual cortex are handling motion information, information about movement, information about colour. Even the recognition of faces – you would be aware of the work of Oliver Sacks – seems to be packaged into parts of the cortex. I didn’t believe it would go as far as it has. Quite extraordinary stuff.
You were drawing now on the Eccles time, those five years out of the Bishop world, as a philosophical time when you probably read Popper – an exciting time of transition.
Yes, although I must admit I didn’t really tackle the philosophy until, in Peter’s group at Canberra, I started carving out new paths. That’s when the fire really started and I found myself under a philosophical attack as well as an empirical one. And that’s when I went back to it.
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
© 2025 Australian Academy of Science
