Introduction to the Special Issue on rapid eye movement sleep

Abstract

It was an ordinary morning in April. As we were discussing shared polysomnographic data, we suddenly realised that we were living in 2023, and that 70 years earlier, Aserinsky and Kleitman discovered what is today universally known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.

Sometimes things happen for no specific reason, and sometimes, the pattern of events transpires as if the stars have aligned.

In an ideal world, we would love to celebrate the anniversary by organising an international meeting in Parma or London inviting a restricted group of experts to focus on the manifold features of REM sleep: dreams, parasomnias, epilepsy, apneas, physiological mechanisms, cognitive function, neural networks, microstructure, atonia, autonomic anarchy, evolutionary anthropology.

In this magical realm, a generous sponsor was mandatory to cover travel and accommodation expenses for participants, but this remained a wishful thought. Moreover, there was a timing problem. Aserinsky and Kleitman's article was published in the journal Science on September 4, 1953, and we aimed to celebrate the anniversary on the same calendar date 70 years later (Aserinsky & Kleitman, 1953).

An alternative was to organise the event virtually, where speakers could connect and listen to each other whilst remaining peacefully at home. And to make things easier, the virtual meeting had to remain limited to the invited speakers only, allowing the entire event to be recorded so that the video could later be disseminated to a wider audience.

A list of REM sleep experts was rapidly compiled and submitted to the selected colleagues who replied rapidly and enthusiastically. Among them, Dieter Riemann, leader in REM-related insomnia and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Sleep Research (JSR), proposed to collect the written presentations in a special issue of the journal inviting us to act as Guest Editors.

Although it was a remote conference, it seemed appropriate for the two organisers to be physically close during the presentations also to make the welcome more warmly. A generous and far-sighted sponsor (Stardea) allowed one of us to fly to London, where an efficient headquarters was arranged at King's College. The different time zones stretching from California to Australia required a skewed agenda, but in the end, the sequence of oral contributions and slides was presented without major hitches and in the late London evening speakers were thanked and invited to submit their manuscripts.

Now that the articles have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, JSR readers can enjoy the well-deserved tribute that the authors accepted to pay to REM sleep.

This is not a trivial nostalgic operation, but a precise belief that many somnologists, and not only among young people, are not at ease with the historical stages of the discipline. For many scholars, everything discovered before the year 2000 does not exist simply because it is not available in the internet world. Characters like Giuseppe Moruzzi, William Dement, Michel Jouvet, Elio Lugaresi, as well as Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman are unknown to most people who work in the field and yet it is thanks to them that the major sleep features and disorders have been identified. Ignoring the past obscures cultural continuity in the sector and enhances the risk of discovering diseases or functions others had already described and published much earlier.

Just as we were preparing this foreword, two leading figures in the microRNAs (miRNAs) research, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, have been announced to have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (Press release. NobelPrize.org, 2024). Initial discovery of miRNA has left the wider scientific community relatively unmoved, perhaps in parallel to how some view recent discoveries in the field of sleep medicine. And yet, fast-forward to today, its role appears to be linked with almost every aspect of human physiology, including REM sleep (Kompotis et al., 2024; Titze-de-Almeida et al., 2021).

And to conclude, whilst the past must not be used to have regrets, one should have a good grasp of it to understand the present, and prepare for the future. We must never forget that we are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.

Liborio Parrino: Conceptualization; writing – original draft; writing – review and editing. Ivana Rosenzweig: Conceptualization; writing – original draft; writing – review and editing.