John C. Liebeskind Biography

John C. Liebeskind was born February 2, 1935, in Waterbury, Connecticut, where his family owned a retail clothing store. He received his early education at the McTernan School and Choate Preparatory School, and spent his summers at Camp Kennebec in Maine, where he later worked as a camp counselor. In 1953, John entered Harvard University, where he majored in Social Relations and graduated cum laude in 1957. He was admitted to the University of Michigan graduate program in clinical psychology, but quickly decided that laboratory science was more intellectually appealing. He changed his field to physiological psychology and completed his graduate work with Stephen Fox. Liebeskind received his Ph.D. in 1962, the year after he married his first wife, Nancy.

From Michigan, John and Nancy went to Paris, where he had a four-year NIH postdoctoral fellowship at the Institut Marey, where he worked with the Institut’s co-director, Madame Denise Albe-Fessard. In Paris, he learned the basic methods and skills of neurophysiological experimentation, and made his first observations of pain, although he was working in other areas. In 1965, however, he read Melzack and Wall’s “gate control” article in Science, and was immediately intrigued by the possibilities of pain as a research problem.

In 1966, Liebeskind was appointed to an assistant professorship at UCLA and very quickly received a grant from the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke to do pain research, a grant which he held through several renewals until 1994. With his first graduate students, David Mayer and Huda Akil, he began a series of systematic explorations of an area of the midbrain known as “the periaqueductal gray”. Their 1971 paper in Science reporting that, while stimulation of this area caused pain responses in animals, stimulation at a less intense level, or cessation of stimulation, appeared to block pain from an external stimulus, such as a paw pinch, established the phenomenon of “stimulation-produced analgesia”. It became a “citation classic” and laid the foundation for the discovery of opiate receptors and the study of endorphins.

In 1973, Liebeskind, Mayer, and Akil presented their work at the First International Symposium of Pain in Issaquah, Washington. Liebeskind became a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), and served on the first Council and the first Nominating Committee. In 1974, he organized the Eastern Pain Association in 1977 to become the American Pain Society (APS). He remained active in the leadership of both organizations, served as President of the APS, and was President-Elect of the IASP when ill health forced him to resign in 1997.

Liebeskind’s lab at UCLA became well-known for its elegant experiments in pain neurophysiology and for the quality of the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows trained there. Never a “hands-on” manager, Liebeskind created a nurturing environment that enabled his students to do their best work and draw conclusions regarding the theoretical and clinical significance of their findings. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, he and his students, including Gayle Page, Jeffery Mogil, Greg Terman, Michael Gold, and Wendy Sternberg, published many important papers in area such as molecular biology of the pain pathways and pain’s role in neuroimmunology

Liebeskind felt that he subordinated his personal life to his work for much of his early career. In 1980, he and Nancy decided to divorce, and in 1982, he married Julia Watt. In his second marriage, he made a conscious effort to devote time to his family, including his and Nancy’s sons, Gabriel and Nicholas, now teenagers, as well as Benjamin, his young son with Julia.

By the early 1990s, his scientific work had won him recognition throughout the pain community, culminating in his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995. The NIH, however, was finding it harder to stretch its research budget to fund the ever-increasing numbers of high-quality grant applications. In 1992, Liebeskind’s application for another renewal of his NINCDS grant was not funded, and he decided that this was the strategic moment to begin phasing out his laboratory and pursue his interest in the history of pain research and management. The following year, he began conducting oral history interviews with the pioneers and leaders of the pain field. Within a period of four years, Liebeskind had completed 38 interviews and established a History of Pain Archive at UCLA. He successfully negotiated the donation of the John Bonica Papers, as well as the records of the major pain organizations, to UCLA; and he built a new team of colleagues in history and archive management.

In the late summer of 1996, John Liebeskind was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx, which necessitated the removal of his entire vocal apparatus. Despite the surgery and radiation treatments, his optimism and energy remained strong, and he come to enjoy his “electronic voice”, using the apparatus as a comic prop. In May of 1997, however, he became increasingly weak and short of breath, and in June, his physicians confirmed that the cancer had metastasized throughout his lungs. Choosing palliative care only, he continued working on the History of Pain project until the last days of his life. John Liebeskind died peacefully on the evening of September 8, 1997.