John Douglas "Jack" Pettigrew (2 October 1943''Who's Who in Australia 2013'', Crown Content, 2012. - 7 May 2019) was an Australian

neuroscientist A neuroscientist (or neurobiologist) is a scientist specializing in neuroscience that deals with the anatomy and function of neurons, Biological neural network, neural circuits, and glia, and their Behavior, behavioral, biological, and psycholo ...

. He was Emeritus Professor of

Physiology Physiology (; ) is the science, scientific study of function (biology), functions and mechanism (biology), mechanisms in a life, living system. As a branches of science, subdiscipline of biology, physiology focuses on how organisms, organ syst ...

and Director of the Vision, Touch and Hearing Research Centre at the

University of Queensland The University of Queensland is a Public university, public research university located primarily in Brisbane, the capital city of the Australian state of Queensland. Founded in 1909 by the Queensland parliament, UQ is one of the six sandstone ...

in Australia.

Research

Pettigrew's research interest was in comparative

neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions, and its disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, ...

. He studied a variety of different birds and mammals with modern neuronal tracing techniques to unravel principles of brain organization. He was the chief proponent of the

flying primate hypothesis In evolutionary biology, the flying primate hypothesis is that megabats, a subgroup of Chiroptera (also known as flying foxes), form an evolutionary sister group of primates. The hypothesis began with Carl Linnaeus in 1758, and was again advanced b ...

, which was based on the similarity between the brains of

megabats Megabats constitute the family Pteropodidae of the order Chiroptera. They are also called fruit bats, Old World fruit bats, or—especially the genera '' Acerodon'' and ''Pteropus''— flying foxes. They are the only member of the superfa ...

and

primates Primates is an order of mammals, which is further divided into the strepsirrhines, which include lemurs, galagos, and lorisids; and the haplorhines, which include tarsiers and simians ( monkeys and apes). Primates arose 74–63 ...

. Special emphasis was placed on the visual, auditory and somatosensory systems. Pettigrew was the first person to clarify the neurobiological basis of

stereopsis Binocular vision is seeing with two eyes, which increases the size of the Visual field, visual field. If the visual fields of the two eyes overlap, binocular #Depth, depth can be seen. This allows objects to be recognized more quickly, camouflage ...

when he described neurones sensitive to

binocular disparity Binocular disparity refers to the difference in image location of similar features seen by the left and right eyes resulting from the eyes' horizontal separation (parallax). In visual perception, binocular disparity refers to edges and small blo ...

. Later, he discovered that owls have independently evolved a system of binocular neurones like those found in mammals. Pettigrew showed evidence for a role for non-visual pathways in the phenomenon of developmental

neuroplasticity Neuroplasticity, also known as neural plasticity or just plasticity, is the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through neurogenesis, growth and reorganization. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain's ability to reorganize and rewir ...

during the postnatal

critical period In developmental psychology and developmental biology, a critical period is a maturational stage in the lifespan of an organism during which the nervous system is especially sensitive to certain environmental stimuli. If, for some reason, the org ...

. Pettigrew used

binocular rivalry Binocular rivalry is a phenomenon of visual perception in which perception alternates between different images presented to each human eye, eye. When one image is presented to one eye and a very different image is presented to the other (also kn ...

as an assay for interhemispheric switching, whose rhythm is altered in

bipolar disorder Bipolar disorder (BD), previously known as manic depression, is a mental disorder characterized by periods of Depression (mood), depression and periods of abnormally elevated Mood (psychology), mood that each last from days to weeks, and in ...

Honours and awards

Pettigrew’s scientific work was recognized by several honours and awards, including becoming a Fellow of the

Royal Society of London The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, r ...

( FRS)in 1987, becoming a Fellow of the

fellow of the Australian Academy of Science The Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science is made up of about 500 Australian scientists. Scientists judged by their peers to have made an exceptional contribution to knowledge in their field may be elected to Fellowship of the Academy ...

(FAAS) in the same year, and being awarded the

Centenary Medal The Centenary Medal is an award which was created by the Australian Government in 2001. It was established to commemorate the centenary of the Federation of Australia and to recognise "people who made a contribution to Australian society or g ...

in 2001 for service to Australian society and science in phylogeny.

Other notable activity

In the 1960s and 1970s, Pettigrew was an accomplished rock climber. His most notable climb came in 1965 when together with Bryden Allen, John Davis, and David Witham he was the first to climb the 562 m (1,844 ft) high

Ball's Pyramid Ball's Pyramid is an uninhabited islet in the Pacific Ocean located southeast of Lord Howe Island, between Australia and New Zealand. The steep rocky basalt outcrop is the eroded plug of a shield volcano and caldera that formed 6.4million ye ...

, the tallest volcanic

stack Stack may refer to: Places * Stack Island, an island game reserve in Bass Strait, south-eastern Australia, in Tasmania’s Hunter Island Group * Blue Stack Mountains, in Co. Donegal, Ireland People * Stack (surname) (including a list of people ...

in the world.Donald E Mitchell
The Man from Ironbark: a profile of Professor Jack Pettigrew FRS, flamboyant sensory systems researcher and recipient of the H Barry Collin Research Medal
, Clinical and Experimental Optometry 94, pp. 494–501 (2011)

References

External links

Batman's place in evolutionThe man in the batMegabats, microbats and the most interesting gene in the genome
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pettigrew, Jack 1943 births 2019 deaths Academic staff of the University of Queensland University of Sydney alumni Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science Bipolar disorder researchers Vision scientists