- Person
- Bernard Katz
- Lived
- 1911–2003
- Field
- Neurophysiology
- From
- German-born British
The story
Bernard Katz grew up a stateless Russian Jew in Leipzig and left Nazi Germany in 1935 with four pounds in his pocket to work with the physiologist A. V. Hill at University College London. After wartime service as a radar officer with the Royal Australian Air Force, he returned to UCL and turned to a basic question: how exactly does a nerve pass its signal to a muscle?
Scientists knew that the nerve ending releases a chemical, acetylcholine, which crosses a narrow gap to the muscle. In the early 1950s Katz and Paul Fatt, recording electrically from that junction, noticed small spontaneous blips that appeared even when the nerve was at rest. Others might have dismissed them as noise. Katz saw that they were all about the same size. With José del Castillo he then showed that the big response produced by a nerve impulse is made of whole numbers of these units, never fractions. Acetylcholine was being released in fixed packets, or quanta.
Electron microscopes were at the same time revealing that nerve endings are packed with tiny bubbles of uniform size. Katz proposed that each of these synaptic vesicles carries one quantum of transmitter and releases it by fusing with the cell membrane. The idea proved right and became the foundation of how scientists understand communication between nerve cells everywhere in the body, including the brain. His laboratory also helped establish key ideas in pharmacology, including the first rigorous proof that the arrow poison tubocurarine blocks the muscle receptor by competing with acetylcholine.
The picture he drew is used every day in medicine. Muscle relaxants given during surgery, drugs for the muscle-weakening disease myasthenia gravis, and botulinum toxin injections for spasms all act on the nerve-muscle junction he mapped, and most drugs that affect the brain work by changing how transmitters are released or received at synapses. Katz shared the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Julius Axelrod and Ulf von Euler.
Why it matters
Katz’s discovery of packet-by-packet transmitter release is the basis for understanding synapses and for the many medicines, from surgical muscle relaxants to brain drugs, that act on them.
About Bernard Katz
Leipzig-born refugee who discovered that nerves release their chemical messengers in tiny fixed packets, the basis of how we understand synapses and the many drugs that act on them.
Sources
- Bernard Katz 1911–2003 (obituary by David Colquhoun) Physiology News, The Physiological Society
- Sir Bernard Katz, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Bernard Katz Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.