A stateless boy in Leipzig
Bernard Katz was born in Leipzig, Germany, on March 26, 1911, the only son of Max Katz, a fur merchant who had left Russia in 1904, and Eugenie Rabinowitz, who was of Polish origin. Because his father was a Russian subject, Bernard was born a citizen of the Tsarist empire; after the Russian Revolution he became stateless, and he stayed stateless until he was 30. Leipzig was his home and German his native language, spoken with the Saxon accent he joked about all his life, but he was never a German citizen.
He was brought up, in his own words, in a completely unorthodox and liberal way. At nine he had his first taste of being an alien Jew, when the head of one Leipzig school refused to admit him, apparently because it would look bad if a Russian Jew topped the entrance exam. He went instead to the König Albert Gymnasium, chose Latin and Greek over mathematics, partly, he said, to leave more time for chess in the city’s cafés, and did well enough to skip a year. In the early 1920s a classmate told the other boys about a plan his father had described at home: Leipzig’s Jews should be gathered in an underground hall and killed with poison gas. Katz wrote decades later that the episode had never been erased from his mind.
Medicine under the shadow of Nazism
Katz studied medicine at the University of Leipzig from 1929, partly as a hedge against an uncertain future. Physics lectures from Peter Debye opened his eyes to the power of scientific ideas tested by experiment, and he began research on muscle under the physiologist Martin Gildemeister, partly to escape the open antisemitism of some fellow students. His work won the university’s Siegfried Garten Prize in 1933, the year Hitler took power. Gildemeister was forced to announce that the prize could not go to a non-Aryan student, though he quietly gave Katz the money in private.
Katz finished his medical degree in 1934, at some risk. In February 1935, aged 23, he took a third-class train to Holland and the ferry to Harwich, carrying a temporary British visa, a League of Nations pass for stateless persons, a letter of recommendation and four pounds. The next day he climbed the stairs at University College London to meet the physiologist A. V. Hill, a Nobel laureate who was also working hard to rescue scientists driven out of Germany.
Apprentice, radar officer, professor
Katz called the years in Hill’s laboratory from 1935 to 1939 the most inspiring period of his life, and Hill the most naturally upright man he had ever known. He earned his PhD in 1938 and, a month before the Second World War began, left for Sydney, where he worked with John Eccles and Stephen Kuffler on how nerves signal to muscles. Their experiments opened a new era in the study of synapses, the junctions where one cell passes a message to the next.
In 1941 he became a naturalised British subject and held a real passport for the first time. He then joined the Royal Australian Air Force and served as a radar officer in the war against Japan; from late 1942 he commanded a radar station on Goodenough Island off New Guinea which, Eccles later wrote, was never off the air. In 1945 he married Marguerite Penly, known as Rita, and a month after the wedding Hill invited him back to London. In 1952 he succeeded Hill as Professor of Biophysics at UCL and head of the department, a post he held until 1978.
Hill’s kindness went beyond science. For three years after their return, until 1949, Bernard and Rita Katz lived with A. V. Hill and his wife Margaret in the top-floor flat of the Hills’ house in Highgate. Back at UCL, Katz also worked with Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, and showed with Hodgkin that the peak of the nerve impulse, its overshoot, is caused by sodium ions rushing into the cell.
The discovery of quanta
When a motor nerve tells a muscle to contract, its ending releases a chemical, acetylcholine, which crosses a tiny gap and acts on the muscle. With Paul Fatt in the early 1950s, Katz recorded the electrical response of the muscle at that junction and noticed something others might have dismissed as noise: small spontaneous blips, even when the nerve was resting. Each blip was the same size. Working next with José del Castillo, he showed that the large response to a nerve impulse is built up from whole numbers of these units, never fractions of one. Acetylcholine, in other words, was released in fixed packets, which he called quanta.
Around the same time, electron microscopes revealed that nerve endings are filled with tiny bubbles of uniform size, synaptic vesicles. Katz proposed that each vesicle holds one quantum of transmitter and empties it by fusing with the cell membrane. The vesicle hypothesis became the foundation of modern neuroscience. With Fatt he also showed that acetylcholine works by opening water-filled pores in the muscle membrane, an early form of the idea of ion channels, and in the early 1970s, with Ricardo Miledi, he used the fine noise in electrical recordings to deduce how single channels behave. That work paved the way for the first recordings of single channels, made in 1976 by Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann, who had worked in Katz’s department.
What it means for medicine
Almost everything the nervous system does, from moving a finger to forming a memory, depends on synapses, and the principles Katz established at the nerve-muscle junction turned out to hold widely in the brain as well. His colleague David Colquhoun wrote that his influence on physiology and pharmacology was inestimable, and that he laid down some of pharmacology’s most important principles. His laboratory gave the first rigorous demonstration that the arrow poison tubocurarine blocks the muscle receptor by competing with acetylcholine, and Katz and del Castillo proposed a mechanism for partial agonists, drugs that switch a receptor only partly on.
Those ideas are part of daily medical practice. Muscle relaxants given during surgery act at exactly the junction he studied, and so do the drugs used to treat myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that weakens muscles. Botulinum toxin, used to treat muscle spasms and migraine, works by stopping vesicles from releasing their acetylcholine. Katz’s findings also had direct influence on the study of organophosphate pesticides and nerve agents, which disrupt the same chemistry. More broadly, the antidepressants, anti-epileptic drugs, anaesthetics and many other medicines that act on the nervous system work by changing how transmitters are packaged, released or received at synapses, the process he was first to describe.
Teacher and writer
Katz supervised only a handful of PhD students himself, among them Paul Fatt, John Nicholls and Donald Jenkinson, but his department at UCL became a magnet for young scientists from around the world. He edited The Journal of Physiology, refereed papers with astonishing speed, and was known for a plain, exact English prose style that put many native speakers to shame. His short book Nerve, Muscle and Synapse (1966) introduced generations of students to the field. He could seem forbidding to anyone presenting a first draft, but colleagues remembered his warmth with juniors and his jokes in dull committee meetings. At one scientific meeting he quietly let a nervous PhD student explain a technique to him, admitting only to knowing it a little, rather than reveal who he was.
He received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1967, was knighted in 1969, and shared the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Ulf von Euler and Julius Axelrod for discoveries about the chemical transmitters in nerve terminals and how they are stored, released and inactivated.
Jewish origins and reconciliation
Katz came from a Russian Jewish family, and antisemitism shaped his path from childhood: a school that would not take a Russian Jew, a classmate repeating talk of gassing Leipzig’s Jews, a prize withheld from a non-Aryan student, and finally emigration in 1935. He was one of a remarkable generation of refugee physiologists and pharmacologists, among them Wilhelm Feldberg, Heinz Schild and Hermann Blaschko, who enriched British science after fleeing the Third Reich.
In later life his birthplace honoured him. Germany awarded him the Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts in 1982, the University of Leipzig gave him an honorary doctorate in 1990, and in 2000 a bronze plaque was unveiled at the university. Its inscription records that he emigrated to England in 1935 because of repression on the grounds of his Jewish origin.
Family and legacy
Bernard and Rita Katz had two sons, David, born in 1947, who studied pharmacology and medicine, and Jonathan, born in 1950, a classicist who became Public Orator of the University of Oxford. Rita died in 1999. Bernard Katz died in London on April 20, 2003, at the age of 92.
UCL named a building and a chair of biophysics after him. His deeper legacy is a picture every student of biology now learns: a nerve ending full of tiny vesicles, each carrying a packet of chemical messenger, releasing them one by one across the synapse. That picture is where the science of the brain, and the design of drugs that act on it, begins.
Sources & further reading
Sir Bernard Katz, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · David Colquhoun, Bernard Katz 1911–2003, Physiology News 52 (Physiological Society obituary) · Bernard Katz, Jewish Virtual Library · Bernard Katz, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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