• Harold Gainer
• Yoshinobu Hara

It is now almost sixty years since Ernst Scharrer, in a paper emanating from his doctoral dissertation studies at the University of Munich (Scharrer, 1928), first described the gland-like secretory characteristics of the magnocellular neurons in the preoptic nucleus of the minnow, Phloxinus laevis. This discovery and its bold interpretation, i.e., the theory of neurosecretion, although initally received sceptically by the scientific community, was to become, largely through the subsequent heroic efforts of Ernst and Berta Scharrer, and their close colleague W. Bargmann (Bargmann and Scharrer, 1951; Sano, 1985), one of the most heuristic concepts in modern neurobiology. Not only did this concept usher in the present highly active era of neuroendocrinology, but also the even more explosive field of neuropeptide research in general (Scharrer, 1987).