Peter Huttenlocher

Peter Richard Huttenlocher (February 23, 1931 – August 15, 2013) was a German-American pediatric neurologist and neuroscientist who discovered how the brain develops in children. He is considered to be one of the fathers of developmental cognitive neuroscience. The individuals with intellectual disability he studied were discovered to have the same number of synapses as those without, but of a different shape. His parents became divorced when he was young, and his mother, Else, an opera singer, refused to join the Nazi Party and fled to the United States in 1937. Peter and his brothers were raised by their father, Richard, who was a chemist. of a severe congenital recessive disorder involving seizures and liver dysfunction contributed to the discovery of Alpers–Huttenlocher syndrome, today recognized as a type of mitochondrial DNA depletion disorder.