As a student at Stanford, I had been introduced to neurobiology as one of several topics in each of eight lecture/lab courses (Invertebrate Zoology, Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy, Embryology, three physiology courses and two biochemistry courses**) and in a year-long independent-study project during my fifth year. But it was during those six years of post-doctoral work that I became comfortable as a neurobiologist. That was accomplished by spending many, many hundreds of hours at the UCLA Biomedical Library, studying the literature from Sherrington to Hodgkin & Huxley and beyond, by attending neuroscience seminars at UCLA, by attending neuroscience-related conferences, by frequent conversations with friends in neuroscience, by participation in the four-week First Intensive Study Program presented at UC Boulder by Frank Schmitt's Neuroscience Research Program (and by participation, three years later, in the sequel, Second Intensive Study Program), by immersion in my own neuroscience research and publication of the results, and by publication (with Leon Harmon) of a major review of the field of neural modeling.
** The second biochemistry course was given in early 1955, very soon after Frederick Sanger had published his sequencing of the insulin A chain (click here for a review of Sanger's career). A substantial section of the course was devoted to Sanger's logic of amino-acid sequencing, which soon would bring him a Nobel prize. Years later, Sanger would pioneer the sequencing of DNA molecules, bringing him a second Nobel prize. He was the giant upon whose shoulders rests modern computational biology.