John C. Liebeskind (1935–1997): A tribute

I’d like to begin by thanking those who have helped me prepare this tribute—contributing pictures, stories, and/or moral support. This group includes many of John’s students and friends, his family, and especially those at the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library at UCLA where the John C. Liebeskind History of Pain Collection is housed. In particular, Marcia Meldrum, who worked closely with John on the Pain Collection and, in 1995, took an oral history from him concerning his perspectives on his career, will be stolen from frequently here. Also, Russell Johnson spent days helping me wade through many of John’s papers on a recent visit to the library.

My job is to address those of you who didn’t know John Liebeskind; to give you a flavor for the importance of this man, not only for the study of the neurobiology of pain—the topic of this conference—but also in positively influencing innumerable lives he came in contact with and, literally, health care worldwide—though he never treated a patient.

I arrived at UCLA for graduate school in the fall of 1980. I had decided to attend UCLA because my psychology teacher, after hearing John speak at a weekend seminar for undergraduate teachers on the East Coast, persuaded me that there was only one option for pain research training—Liebeskind. Fig. 1 is a picture of the John Liebeskind I met and got to know as a student in his laboratory—notice the phone. John was never too busy for the phone or the people calling him on it. Although I actually enjoyed this characteristic once I left UCLA, while I was there I hated it. The other imposing inanimate object in his office was the bulletin board. Now, the bulletin board may have simply been a device John put up to give students he was …