Friday’s (Jan. 26) Google Doodle celebrated the 127th birthday of Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield.
Once considered “The greatest living Canadian” for his work in advancing the field of medicine, specifically with neuroscience, Penfield was born in Spokane, Washington and was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford. He also studied at Princeton, and after moving to Montreal, he founded and became the first director of the Montreal Neurological Institute in 1934.
The homepage of the search engine transformed into an orange box as Penfield’s face formed the first ‘O’ in the word Google. The latter ‘G’ in the word was formed by the fumes of a piece of burnt toast being inhaled by an animated nose — signifying Penfield’s discovery that stimulating certain physical parts of the brain could evoke memory recall while experimenting with using electrical probes to treat seizure activity in the brain while a patient was fully awake.
Read more about today’s Google Doodle here.