Sir Bernard Katz, the Nobel Prize winner in Physiology of Medicine in 1970 was born on 26 March 1911 in Leipzig, Germany. Widely remembered for his investigation of the biochemistry of the nervous system and of the function of the mysterious pineal gland in the brain, Katz, died in 2003 aged 92.
The Nobel laureate was one of the brilliant young German physiologists who sought sanctuary in Britain after Adolf Hitler came into power in his homeland in 1933.
Katz's discovery in the 1950s of the "quantum" character of nerve junction biochemistry transformed scientific perception of the nature of signal processing in the nervous system. For this work he received a knighthood in 1969 and, in the following year, shared the Nobel Prize for physiology of medicine with Julius Axelrod of America and Ulf von Euler of Sweden.
According to the obituary written by the Physiological Society, Sir Bernard Katz was born and brought up in Leipzig, so his native language was German. Though he was never a German citizen.
Bernard Katz was one of the last of the generation of distinguished physiologists who were refugees from the Third Reich and who contributed immeasurably to the scientific reputation of their adopted country. Like many others (Feldberg, Schild, Blaschko and Vogt, to name but four), Katz's German accent never entirely disappeared, according to the Physiological Society.
Sir Bernard Katz work
According to the Nobel Prize academy, Katz worked on the nervous systems of people and animals, which consist of many nerve cells with long extensions, or nerve fibers. Signals are conveyed between cells by small electrical currents and by special substances known as signal substances. The transfers occur via contacts, or synapses.
In the 1950s Bernard Katz studied how impulses in motor neurons activate muscular activity by measuring variations in electrical charges. For example, he showed how the signal substance acetylcholine in synapses is released in certain amounts.
