LAUSR

Emeritus Professor John (Jack) D. Pettigrew MBBS, MSc, FRS, FAA died after a car accident in May 2019. Jack had retired from the University of Queensland a decade earlier, after 25 years as Professor of Physiology; more recently, he moved to Tasmania to be closer to many of his family. I was often asked, “Have you seen Jack lately? What is he working on now?” Between trips to Western Australia studying rock art in the Kimberley, to Arizona scrutinizing fossils, and to New York for Thanksgiving, Jack had developed an interest in the early French mariners who explored the coast that Jack could see from his Tasmanian residence—looking across D'Entrecasteaux Channel toward Bruny Island. I can report that Jack brought his usual flair and passion to this most recent project; he was meeting with amateur and professional historians and planning a genetic analysis of plants attributed to the “French Garden.” Jack Pettigrew's extraordinarily eclectic range of interests is partly reflected in the diverse papers contributed by Jack's colleagues to this special issue of the Journal of Comparative Neurology. Jack published 11 papers in JCN over the course of his career and he would have been very pleased by the mix of subjects covered in the special issue. Some of the papers are on topics that Jack championed—but Jack would have an up-to-date knowledge in all the areas and could challenge the authors' assumptions and methods. Some of the papers focus on Pettigrew the man, including the Commentaries by David Vaney (the foundations of visual neuroscience in Australia; Vaney, 2020) and Reto Weiler (Australia's mysterious rock paintings; Weiler, 2020). David Presti's absorbing article (collaborative dialogue between Buddhism and science) describes two intense collaborations with Jack spaced 25 years apart, the first centered at Caltech around 1977 and the second in the Himalayas around 2003 (Presti, 2020). They are representative of two themes that were of life-long interest to Jack: comparative sensory neuroscience and the biology of consciousness. These three papers add to Don Mitchell's warm biography of Jack Pettigrew, commissioned to mark the award of the H. Barry Collin Medal (Mitchell, 2011). Jack himself wrote an idiosyncratic autobiographical sketch (Pettigrew, 1999) for the newsletter of the International Society for Neuroethology, of which he was President from 1989–1992. Yet many gaps in these accounts remain. At the invitation of the other Guest Editors of this special issue (Marcello Rosa, Paul Manger, and David Vaney), I am honored to document some of my own thoughts on Jack Pettigrew, who was a great colleague and friend for 40 years. David Vaney has contributed the accompanying portrait taken in 2011—remarkably capturing the man, his condition and his science. At first introduction, Jack Pettigrew would typically engage new colleagues in a discussion about their field and, drawing on his broad knowledge, challenge how the “big” questions may be addressed. He would also excitedly show a new piece of kit or, more recently, a clever App that had caught his attention. My experience at Monash University was no exception. An afternoon was spent chatting about topographic maps and auditory localization with Lindsay Aitkin and my fellow PhD students (Malcolm Semple, Dennis Philips); a research plan was formulated and then we all played with Jack's Sony Walkman. A few months later Jack returned from Caltech with an apparatus to move a speaker in space—beautifully built by the famed Herb Adams—and we were underway. Although five major papers emanated from this work, adding significantly to the understanding of acoustic space encoding, we never “found” a map of auditory space in mammalian cortex or midbrain. Jack was never quite satisfied with this negative result—displaying an endearing, if annoying, trait of reverting to (or remembering only) the hypothesis rather than the result! Jack was in the business of proving hypotheses, not falsifying them. Pettigrew's return to Australia in 1980 was much anticipated by the Melbourne neuroscience community. Many of this group had Received: 16 June 2020 Accepted: 16 June 2020