Arturo Rosenblueth

2 October 1900, Ciudad Guerrero, Chihuahua, Mexico – 20 September 1970, Mexico City, Mexico (aged 69)

Mexican physiologist who co-wrote "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" (1943) with Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, and whose talk at a 1942 New York meeting helped start the Macy Conferences.

Life

Rosenblueth studied in Mexico City, Berlin and Paris, where he qualified in medicine. In 1930 he went to Harvard Medical School on a Guggenheim fellowship to work with Walter Cannon, and stayed for more than a decade. There he organised an informal interdisciplinary seminar on scientific method that Norbert Wiener attended, beginning a long friendship. He returned to Mexico in 1944, headed physiology at the National Institute of Cardiology, and in 1961 became the first director of the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies (Cinvestav) of the National Polytechnic Institute. Wiener spent several extended stays working with him in Mexico City.

Influences

Cannon, who coined the term “homeostasis”, taught him to think of the body as a self-regulating system. Wiener brought mathematics and the engineering view of feedback from wartime fire control.

Contributions

“Behavior, Purpose and Teleology” (1943), written with Wiener and Bigelow, argued that purposeful behaviour can be explained scientifically as behaviour controlled by negative feedback from its goal. Rosenblueth presented the ideas at a 1942 meeting in New York organised by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, which inspired the later Macy Conferences on cybernetics. Wiener dedicated Cybernetics (1948) to him. With Cannon he did influential work on the chemical transmission of nerve signals, and with Wiener he published on the conduction of impulses in heart muscle.

Why it matters today

Rosenblueth’s role is a reminder that cybernetics began as a collaboration between physiology and engineering, and that it had important roots outside the United States and Britain. His institution-building in Mexico shaped Latin American science for decades.

Further reading

  • Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology”, Philosophy of Science (1943)
  • Arturo Rosenblueth, Mind and Brain: A Philosophy of Science (1970)

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