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Died 19 November 1990, Warsaw, Poland | ||
Liliana Lubińska (14 October 1904 – 19 November 1990) was a Polish neuroscientist known for her research on the peripheral nervous system and her discovery of bidirectional axoplasmic transport. Liliana Lubińska and her husband Jerzy Konorsk founded the Department of Neurophysiology at the Nencki Institution in 1946
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Early life and education
Lubińska was born in Łódź in 1904 and married Jerzy Konorski, a collaborator and fellow neuroscientist. Lubińska entered the University of Warsaw to study biology in 1923; however, a year (1924) later she transferred to the University of Paris, Sorbonne to continue her study of biological sciences. In 1927,Lubińska she received her B.A. in biological chemistry, and physiology, and her doctorate in 1932. While working on her doctorate, Lubińska worked in Louis and Marcelle Lapicque's Laboratory of Physiology, investigating chronaxie and reflexes. Her doctoral thesis focused on noniterative reflex, and ultimately received a prize for her thesis from the Academy of Paris.
Career and research
After finishing her doctorate in Paris, Lubińska began her independent research on the effect of different agents on excitability of neuromuscular preparation and took part in experiments of Jerzy Konorski and Stefan Miller on conditioned reflexes at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Warsaw. When World War II broke out between 1939 and 1940, she was forced to flee as the Institution was destroyed by bombardment. Lubińska and Konorski tried desperately to cross northern border to eventually join Konorski's brother in England; however, the heavy German control caused them to remain in Bialystok. Soon, Axis powers occupied the entire eastern part of Poland, including Bialystok, forcing the pair to flee to the Caucasus. There, she and her husband collaborated on peripheral nerve regeneration at the Georgian Institute of Experimental Medicine in Sukhumi from 1940-1945.
After the war, Lubińska's research continued in the realm of the peripheral nervous system. From 1945 to her retirement in 1982, she studied neural structure and physiology, especially axoplasmic transport, and showed that axoplasmic transport could be bidirectional. With collaboration with Giuseppe Moruzzi and Horace Winchell Magoun, together they concluded established that the brain stem contains neurons that condition the brain centers awareness and posture gave the conscious state control physical foundation, which led to the discovery such system is active during waking and dreaming. Such contributions by Lubińska lead to a further understanding and discoveries in the neuroscience field. Over her career, she published approximately 80 papers and was widely acclaimed as being at the cutting edge of her field.