Katz, Bernard (1911–2003)

German-born British biophysicist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1970 for work on the storage, release, and inactivation of neurotransmitters, research vital in the search for remedies for nervous and mental disorders. He was knighted in 1969.

Katz was born in Leipzig, studied medicine at the university there, and then did postgraduate work at University College, London. Having done research in Australia 1939–42, he then served in the Royal Australian Air Force until the end of World War II, after which he returned to the UK. He spent the rest of his academic career at University College, London, becoming professor in 1952.

In the 1940s, Katz joined in the Nobel-prize-winning research of Alan Hodgkin on the electrochemical behaviour of nerve membranes. During the 1950s, Katz found that minute amounts of acetylcholine were randomly released by nerve endings at the neuromuscular junction, giving rise to very small electrical potentials; he also found that the size of the potential was always a multiple of a certain minimum value. These findings led him to suggest that acetylcholine was released in discrete ‘packets’ (analogous to quanta) of a few thousand molecules each, and that these packets were released relatively infrequently while a nerve was at rest but very rapidly when an impulse arrived at the neuromuscular junction.