W. Maxwell Cowan

William Maxwell Cowan (27 September 1931 – 30 June 2002) was a South African neuroscientist known for his work on developmental plasticity and neural connectivity. He is credited with helping to contribute to the growth of modern neuroanatomy through his use of novel anterograde tracing techniques which fundamentally transformed the field in the 1970s.

Early life and education William Maxwell Cowan was born to Scottish parents in Johannesburg, South Africa, on 27 September 1931. In the 1920s, Cowan's family, who previously worked in the shipbuilding industry in Scotland, emigrated to South Africa to look for mining jobs in Transvaal Province after the British government closed many of their shipyards in Glasgow during a peacetime downturn.

Cowan's interest in a legal career that first year soon waned, and he became more aware and troubled by the inequality between whites and blacks in South African society. He decided to change careers and study medicine instead when a friend of the family recommended it as way for him to dedicate his life to serving the community. He studied medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand (1951, BSc), several years prior to Sydney Brenner, whom he met at the school. In 1953, at the recommendation of anthropologist Raymond Dart, Cowan went on to Hertford College, Oxford, to study neuroanatomy and perform doctoral research under Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, earning his DPhil (1956) and his BM BCh (1958). He became associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for two years, from 1966 to 1968, and then moved to the Washington University in St. Louis, where he headed and created the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the Washington University School of Medicine from 1968 to 1980. According to Steven E. Hyman, Cowan built the department "into one of the most important early intellectual centers for neuroscience research." Cowan became director of developmental neurobiology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies from 1980 to 1986, until he returned to Washington University as provost and executive vice-chancellor.

Journal editor Cowan helped establish neuroscience in the 1960s as an interdisciplinary enterprise. As managing editor of The Journal of Comparative Neurology from 1968 to 1980, it became a leading source for neuroscience research.

Personal life Cowan married school teacher Margaret Sherlock and they had two sons and one daughter. He signed his work as "W. Maxwell Cowan", but his friends called him "Max". After coping with prostate cancer, Cowan died at home in Rockville, Maryland, at age 70. Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1981) Karl Spencer Lashley Award, American Philosophical Society (1984)

Selected publications For an extensive, but selective bibliography of scientific papers by Cowan, see The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography (2004), pp. 198–208.

As author Cowan, W.M.; Gottlieb, D.I.; Hendrickson, A.E.; Price, J. L.; Woolsey, T.A. 1972. "The autoradio-graphic demonstration of axonal connections in the central nervous system." Brain Research, 37 (1): 21–51.

As editor Studies in Developmental Neurobiology: Essays in Honor of Viktor Hamburger (1981) Synapses (2000)