Bernard Katz
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Bernard Katz
German–British neurophysiologist (1911–
Born at Leipzig in Germany, Katz received his MD from the university there in 1934 and his PhD, under Archibald Hill, from the University of London in 1938. He spent the war in Australia first working with John Eccles and later in the Royal Australian Air Force as a radar operator. Katz returned to London in 1946 to University College and in 1952 became professor of biophysics, a post he retained until he retired in 1978.
In 1936 Henry Dale demonstrated that peripheral nerves act by releasing the chemical acetylcholine in response to a nerve impulse. To find how this secretion takes place Katz, working in collaboration with the British biophysicist, Paul Fatt, inserted a micropipette at a neuromuscular junction to record the ‘end-plate potential’ or EPP. He noted a random deflection on the oscilloscope with an amplitude of about 0.5 millivolt even in the absence of all stimulation. At first he assumed such a reading to be interference arising from the machine but the application of curare, an acetylcholine antagonist, by abolishing the apparently random EPPs, showed the activity in the nerves is real.
Consequently Katz proposed his quantum hypothesis. He suggested that nerve endings secrete small amounts of acetylcholine in a random manner in specific amounts (or quanta). When a nerve is stimulated it does not begin secreting but instead enormously increases the number of quanta of acetylcholine released. Katz was able to produce a good deal of evidence for this hypothesis, which he later presented in his important work Nerve, Muscle and Synapse (1966).
It was mainly for this work that Katz shared the 1970 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with Julius Axelrod and Ulf von Euler.
Katz, Sir Bernard, 1911-2003, British biophysicist, b. Germany, M.D. Univ. of Leipzig, 1934; Ph.D. University College, London, 1938. Katz became a British subject in 1941. He was a professor at University College, London, from 1952, having taken a post as a researcher there after World War II. In 1970 Katz was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Ulf von Euler and Julius Axelrod for elucidating the action of neurotransmitters, work which helped establish the foundations of psychopharmacology. Katz's specific contribution was uncovering the mechanism by which the transmitter acetylcholine is released from the nerve terminals at the nerve-muscle junction. He discovered that its release was continuous and spontaneous and that it occurred in "packets," now called vesicles, of consistently varying size. He was knighted in 1969.
(kăts), Bernard Born 1911.
German-born British physiologist. He shared a 1970 Nobel Prize for the study of nerve impulse transmission.
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Bernard Katz
| Bernard Katz | |
|---|---|
| Born | 26 March 1911 Leipzig, Germany. |
| Died | 20 April 2003 (aged 92) London, England. |
| Fields | Neurophysiology |
| Institutions | University College London. Sydney Hospital. |
| Alma mater | University of Leipzig |
| Known for | Neurophysiology of the synapse |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1970) |
Sir Bernard Katz, FRS[1] (26 March 1911 – 20 April 2003)[2] was a German-born biophysicist, noted for his work on nerve biochemistry. He shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1970 with Julius Axelrod and Ulf von Euler. He was knighted in 1970.
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Contents
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Life
Born in Leipzig to a Jewish family, Germany, he was educated at the Albert Gymnasium in that city from 1921 to 1929 and went on to study medicine at the University of Leipzig. He graduated in 1934 and fled to Britain in February 1935, the rise of Hitler having made his Russian Jewish heritage dangerous. He went to work at University College London, initially under the tutelage of Archibald Vivian Hill. He finished his PhD in 1938 and won a Carnegie Fellowship to study with John Carew Eccles at Sydney Hospital. He was naturalised in 1941 and joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1942. He spent the war in the Pacific as a radar officer. He married Marguerite Penly in 1945 and returned to UCL as an assistant director in 1946. Back in England he also worked with the 1963 Nobel prize winners Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley. Katz was made a professor at UCL in 1952 and head of biophysics, he was also elected to the Royal Society[1]. He stayed as head of biophysics until 1978 when he became emeritus professor. At the age of 92, he died in London on 20 April 2003.
Research
His research uncovered fundamental properties of synapses, the junctions across which nerve cells signal to each other and to other types of cells. By the 1950s, he was studying the biochemistry and action of acetylcholine, a signalling molecule with which synapses linking "motor nerves" to muscles stimulate contraction. Katz won the Nobel for his discovery that neurotransmitter release at synapses is "quantal"--that is, that at any particular synapse the amount of neurotransmitter released is never less than a certain amount, and if more is always an integral number times this amount. He also discovered what came to be known as kiss-and-run fusion. This circumstance arises, scientists now know, because, prior to their release into the synaptic gap, transmitter molecules reside in like-sized subcellular packages known as synaptic vesicles (more at exocytosis).
Katz's work had immediate influence on the study of organophosphates and organochlorines, the basis of new post-war study for nerve agents and pesticides, as he determined that the complex enzyme cycle was easily disrupted.
Works
- The Release of Neural Transmitter Substances (The Sherrington Lectures X), Charles C Thomas Publisher, Springfield (Illinois) 1969, pp. 60
See also
References
- ^ a b Sakmann, B. (2007). "Bernard Katz. 26 March 1911 -- 20 April 2003: Elected 1952". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 53: 185–202. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2007.0013. PMID 18543466.
- ^ "School of Katz" (PDF). Quarterly Journal of Experimental Biology. 1990. http://ep.physoc.org/cgi/issue_pdf/frontmatter_pdf/74/1.pdf.
External links
- Sir Bernard Katz Biography. Nobel Foundation
- Guardian Obituary
- Australian Neuroscience Society Obituary
- Sabbatini, R.M.E.: Neurons and synapses. The history of its discovery IV. Chemical transmission. Brain & Mind, 2004.
- Physiology Online, PhysiologyNews, Issue 52, Autumn 2003
- Bernard Katz: "An autobiographical sketch"
- König-Albert-Gymnasium Leipzig
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Mentioned in
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