21 Facts About Otto Loewi

Otto Loewi was born in Frankfurt, Germany on June 3,1873 in a Jewish family.

Otto Loewi went to study medicine at the University of Strasbourg, Germany in 1891, where he attended courses by famous professors Gustav Schwalbe, Oswald Schmiedeberg, and Bernhard Naunyn among others.

Otto Loewi was a member of the fraternity Burschenschaft Germania Strassburg.

In 1902 Otto Loewi was a guest researcher in Ernest Starling's laboratory in London, where he met his lifelong friend Henry Dale.

In 1905, Otto Loewi became Associate Professor at Meyer's laboratory and received Austrian citizenship.

Otto Loewi had been a professor at the University of Vienna.

Otto Loewi was the last Jew hired by the University between 1903 and the end of the war.

In 1921, Otto Loewi investigated how vital organs respond to chemical and electrical stimulation.

Otto Loewi established their relative dependence on epinephrine for proper function.

Otto Loewi arrived to Britain in September 1938 and shortly afterwards he was offered a visiting professorship at the Universite libre de Bruxelles via the Francqui Foundation.

Otto Loewi worked at the Nuffield Institute for Medical Research affiliated with Oxford before accepting an offer of a tenured research professor position at the New York University College of Medicine.

Otto Loewi arrived to the US in June 1940 and was joined by his wife only in early 1941.

Otto Loewi died in New York City on December 25,1961.

Otto Loewi gave the Nobel diploma to the University of Graz in Austria in 1983, where it currently resides, along with a bronze copy of a bust of Loewi.

Otto Loewi dissected out of frogs two beating hearts: one with the vagus nerve which controls heart rate attached, the other heart on its own.

Otto Loewi called the unknown chemical Vagusstoff, naming it after the nerve and the German word for substance.

Otto Loewi's experiment was iconic because it was the first to demonstrate the endogenous release of a chemical substance that could cause a response in the absence of electrical stimulation.

Otto Loewi is known for the means by which the idea for his experiment came to him.

Otto Loewi woke up, scribbled the experiment onto a scrap of paper on his night-stand, and went back to sleep.

Thirteen years later, Otto Loewi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with Sir Henry Hallett Dale.

Otto Loewi observed that by removing the pancreas from dogs, it gave them an experimental form of diabetes, which led to a change of the response of the eye to adrenaline.