14 Facts About Bernard Katz

Bernard Katz shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1970 with Julius Axelrod and Ulf von Euler.

Bernard Katz was educated at the Albert Gymnasium in that city from 1921 to 1929 and went on to study medicine at the University of Leipzig.

Bernard Katz graduated in 1934 and fled to Britain in February 1935.

Bernard Katz went to work at University College London, initially under the tutelage of Archibald Vivian Hill.

Bernard Katz finished his PhD in 1938 and won a Carnegie Fellowship to study with John Carew Eccles at the Kanematsu Institute of Sydney Medical School.

Bernard Katz obtained British nationality in 1941 and joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1942.

Bernard Katz spent the war in the Pacific as a radar officer and in 1946 was invited back to UCL as an assistant director by Hill.

For three years until 1949, the Bernard Katz family lived with Hill and his wife Margaret in the top flat of their house in Highgate.

Bernard Katz was made a professor at UCL in 1952 and head of the Biophysics Department; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1952.

Bernard Katz stayed as head of Biophysics until 1978 when he became emeritus professor.

Bernard Katz died in London on 20 April 2003, at the age of 92.

Bernard Katz's research uncovered fundamental properties of synapses, the junctions across which nerve cells signal to each other and to other types of cells.

Bernard Katz won the Nobel for his discovery with Paul Fatt that neurotransmitter release at synapses is "quantal", meaning 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.

Bernard 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.