Edward Evarts

Edward Vaughan Evarts (March 28, 1926 – July 2, 1985) was an American neuroscientist. He pioneered single-unit recordings from the brains of awake, behaving monkeys.

Life Evarts was born in New York City in 1926 to Yachdiel (Edward Mark) Evarts and Mary Bowen Porter Evarts. His father was born to Russian parents who had immigrated to the US from Germany in 1890, when Edward Mark Evarts was one year old. Edward Vaughan Evarts received his undergraduate degree at Harvard College and a M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School in 1948. Evarts undertook an internship at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. He worked with Karl Lashley at Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology in Orange Park, Florida beginning in 1949. Evarts married Josephine Semmes, a neuropsychologist. Evarts also worked at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London. After a residency in psychiatry at the Payne Whitney Institute in New York, Evarts joined the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland in 1953.

Based on these observations, he developed the concepts of "motor set" and "transcortical reflex". "Psychomotor set" describes neural activity that occurs when a motor action in response to a stimulus ("go-cue") is being prepared. "Transcortical reflex" describes the operation of motor cortex in the way similar to spinal reflexes that influence spinal motoneuron firing.

Family

On September 12th, 1971, Ritva Poukka Evarts of Finland came to the NIH as a visiting scientist. Edward Vaughan Evarts was survived by his wife, Ritva, his son, Edward, and his two daughters, Joan and Lucy, as well as his sister Elizabeth Burr.