Wilfrid Rall Archive: Pioneer of Dendritic Function and Computational Neuroscience

Curated by Gordon M. Shepherd, with the assistance of Idan Segev, John Rinzel, Melissa Grafe, Phil Barello and Charles A. Greer. Special thanks to Mary Ellen Condon Rall, Madelyn Rall Badger, and Sara Rall, for donation of the Rall papers to establish this archive.
We invite other neuroscientists to consider donating their papers here or elsewhere to further a deeper understanding of the creative process in neuroscience.

• Wilfrid Rall (1922–2018). Segev, Hausser, Rinzel, Shepherd. 2018. Neuron.
  
• Wilfrid Rall. Shepherd. 2018. Neuroinformatics.
• The Theoretical Foundation of Dendritic Function Segev, Rinzel, Shepherd. 1995. (collected papers, MIT digital edition; includes a complete bibliography)
• Lectures on Cable Theory 1993
• Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience. 2008. First Awardee Wilfrid Rall

Wilfrid Rall Research Notebooks (1962-1972)

Set of 11 volumes plus loose papers, which Rall used to record the day’s computer runs, calculations, discussions, hypotheses, summaries of progress, and plans for the future. The volumes are a running record of his busy life as one of the first neuroscience biophysicists, and his conscientious efforts to keep up with the many projects and thoughts stimulated by his work. They provide unique insights into how in his earliest work he brought together several disciplines in creating the computational approach to analysing the functional organization of neurons and neuronal microcircuits as the basis for the future field of computational neuroscience.

Tools for identifying, searching and retrieving topics in a notebook

Most of the notebooks lack a built in page numbering sequence, so several tools are provided for accessing the topics. For archival purposes, each page has been scanned as a pdf. The archival sequence of pdfs, with its own numbering sequence of the pages, is provided for the clearest reproduction of each page.
For the index, each page has been reviewed by one or more curators to identify and define the topic covered, which in many cases involved Rall creating new terms and concepts. Each scanned page of written material is approximately a 1 MB pdf, which makes a slow process for searching the pdfs directly.
The Notebooks can be searched rapidly by using the “webviewer” to flip through the pages, or click on “pdf” and from the index enter a desired page number in the small box in the upper-left corner, or use the nearby arrows to move forward or backward. Some topics of broad interest in the index are directly linked to the indicated page
In most of the notebooks (except Notebooks 1, 2 and 6) Rall entered his own numbering sequence with a number # in the upper right hand corner of the page, indicated by his initials wr# in the index. In Notebook 6 each page comes already numbered. Selected topics of interest have direct links by clicking the wr#.
The surest way to identify the page of a topic is indicated by the date that Rall entered for the entry, in the upper left hand corner of a page.
Thus, a full index entry reads: page (p) in preview web sequence; page (wr) in the Rall notebook pdf; date of entry in the Rall notebook; title or topic covered on that page(s); comment by curator in italics; entry of special interest in bold.
Example: Notebook 4 p.121 wr58 8/25/64 Action potential computations: active vs passive dendrites. First Hodgkin-Huxley-like action potential in a compartmental model of a dendrite
Example: Notebook 5 p.155 wr75 12/2/64 Value of a simpler Hodgkin-Huxley action potential model. First Hodgkin-Huxley-like action potential in a compartmental model of a dendritic neuron

Links from the index topic to the preview web page and pdf page are under construction.

Table of Contents

Scientific correspondence of GMS with Charles Phillips, Tom Powell, Wilfrid Rall, Tom Reese, and others

• 1964-1965
• 1966-1968
• Miscellaneous

Scientific instruments used in the studies of Phillips, Powell and Shepherd (1963) and Shepherd (1963a, b) that were the basis for the electrophysiological studies modeled by Rall, Shepherd, Reese and Brightman (1966) and Rall and Shepherd (1968). Fabricated by Edgar Schuster, renowned instrument maker in Oxford, 1940s-1960s.

• Headholder
• Glass Capillary Microforge