Palay made many contributions was to determine which profiles belonged to which parts of cells and which criteria could be used to selectively identify the myriad profiles encountered in electron micrographs.

Sandy was born in Cleveland, Ohio, of Russian Jewish immigrant parents. In 1940 he received his bachelor’s degree in English from Oberlin College, a place for which he had such fond memories that he donated his collection of neuroscience journals and histological slides to the college. In 1940 he entered the School of Medicine at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve), with the intention of becoming a bacteriologist. In the spring of his first year at medical school he applied for a fellowship that would allow him to do research in the summer break. He chose to work in the laboratory of Ernst and Berta Scharrer, where he was given the project of trying to stain dropletladen cells in the meninges of the toad. In 1944 he published the results of this investigation. The Scharrers taught Sandy a great deal about scientific investigation, about neuroanatomy, and about cytology, and eventually Sandy went on to work on neurosecretion (1945,1), which was Ernst Scharrer’s prime interest (1945,2). Sandy continued to work with the Scharrers throughout his time in medical school, and he developed a close relationship with Ernst Scharrer, who was to have a great influence in guiding Sandy’s scientific career.

After completing his M.D. degree in 1943 Sandy spent a year as an intern at New Haven Hospital, where in the evenings he continued his research in the Department of Anatomy at Yale University. He worked on tracing the neurosecretory pathway from the preoptic nucleus to the neurohypophysis in catfish, using material that he had brought from Cleveland. At the end of the internship Sandy returned to Western Reserve University as a resident in medi-