In 1949,Giuseppe Moruzzi and Horace Magoun published their paper describing the reticular activating system. By so doing, they began the process of realising that sleep was not merely a passive withdrawal of something, and waking the opposite, but a far more nuanced and complex process. From the Wikipedia page on Moruzzi:
Until the 1940s, some scientists felt like wakefulness simply required an adequate level of sensory input rather than a specific process inside the brain. In a 1949 experiment with a cat, Moruzzi and Magoun proved that stimulation of a certain brain region (near the intersection of the pons and midbrain) created a state of alertness. This stimulated area of the brain became known as the reticular activating system or reticular formation.[5] In their experiments, Moruzzi and Magoun also transected the cat’s reticular formation without disrupting any of the sensory nerves; the cat was rendered comatose.[6] The experiment shifted science’s conception of sleep from a passive process to one that was actively controlled by the brain.[3]
Unfortunately I cannot get a full text of this paper via the UCD library online. I don’t think any particular fanfare is greeting this anniversary. believed Moruzzi and Magoun should have been awarded a Nobel Prize this speech bythe 1986 Nobel Laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini says so explictly
A Medical Education 