[1] He made the discovery after hours spent studying the eyelids of sleeping subjects.
While the phenomenon was in the beginning more interesting for a fellow of PhD student Aserinsky, William Charles Dement, both Aserinsky and their PhD adviser, Nathaniel Kleitman, went on to demonstrate that this "rapid-eye movement" was correlated with dreaming and a general increase in brain activity.
Because of these discoveries, Aserinsky and Kleitman are generally considered the founders of modern sleep research.
Eugene Aserinsky died on July 22, 1998, when his car hit a tree north of San Diego.
An autopsy was inconclusive about the cause of the accident, but raised the possibility that it had resulted from him having fallen asleep at the wheel.