John Sutton Barlow

John Sutton Barlow, MD, age 82 of Concord, , died February 15, 2008. He was married for 57 years to Sibylle (Jahrreis) Barlow.

Born in Raleigh, North Carolina on June 10, 1925 to David H. Barlow and Anne (Sutton) Barlow, he grew up in Hamlet, North Carolina.

In January 1942, mid-way through 11th grade, he was admitted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He graduated in 1944 with a major in physics and mathematics.

Mr. Barlow served in the U.S. Navy from June 1944 to August 1946. He also attended radar school at MIT. He remained in the Naval Reserve as a Lt. JG until his resignation in 1948 before he had become a conscientious objector to war.

After active duty he returned to UNC and obtained an MS in physics. Shortly after beginning further graduate studies at John Hopkins University, he decided to apply to medical school and was allowed to take pre-medical courses along with graduate physics courses.

He returned to Chapel Hill for the first two years of medical school then transferred to Harvard Medical School. By that time he had become interested in Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics and decided that his wartime training in electronics combined with medical training pointed to a career of study in the nervous system. Even before graduating medical school, in a joint project between Massachusetts General Hospital and the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, he began designing and building the first U.S. analog correlator for brain potentials (now at the MIT Museum).

After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1953, Dr. Barlow began his career of more than 50 years as a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, mainly in EEG analysis. He was a past president of the Eastern Association of Electroencephalographers and the American EEG Society. In more recent years he designed electronic models to demonstrate how parts of the brain work. He authored many scientific articles and two books in his field.

He also translated scientific articles and books from Russian, Polish Czech, Bulgarian, and Chinese with the aid of many dictionaries. It was while looking through Chinese dictionaries that he discovered the Russian graphical system for arranging Chinese characters in a dictionary. In the hope of spreading this system to the rest of the world, he added English and appendices to an existing large Chinese-Russian dictionary to produce the 856-page A Chinese-Russian-English Dictionary, arranged by the Rosenberg Graphical System. He also researched and wrote about the life of Otto O. Rosenberg, the buddhologist who perfected the graphical system.

Mr. Barlow's interests included train travel, world affairs (especially the United Nations), music, biking, unicycling, and reading biographies of scientists. He played the pipe organ at home and on trips abroad, with emphasis on J.S. Bach because (they had the same initials). He was also known for his puns.

Besides his wife, he is survived by their children Thomas of Wilminton, Del., Robert of Pleasanton, Calif., and Lisa of Boulder, Col., six grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter. His brother David predeceased him.