Bernard Katz

Origins and early life

Bernard Katz was born in Leipzig on 26 March 1911, the only son of Max Katz, a fur merchant who had left Russia in 1904, and of Eugenie Rabinowitz; stateless from the age of six, he was never a German citizen. He grew up in a family of Russian Jewish origin, and at nine he was refused entry to a Leipzig school whose head did not want a Russian Jew to come top of the entrance examination.

Work and career

He studied medicine in Leipzig, and when his research won the Siegfried Garten Prize in 1933, his teacher was forced to announce that it could not go to a “non-Aryan” student, and paid him the money in private. In February 1935, with his medical degree, a stateless person's pass and four pounds in his pocket, he left for London, where Archibald Vivian Hill took him on as a doctoral student at University College. He took his doctorate in 1938, worked in Sydney from 1939 with John Eccles on the junction between nerve and muscle, became a British subject in 1941 and served as a radar officer in the Royal Australian Air Force until the war ended.

Back in London from 1946, he showed with Alan Hodgkin that the peak of the nerve impulse is carried by an inflow of sodium ions, and in 1952 he succeeded Hill as professor of biophysics, heading the department until 1978. With Paul Fatt he noticed tiny spontaneous signals where nerve meets muscle and deduced that acetylcholine is released in packets of fixed size, or quanta, principles later found to hold in the brain too.

Recognition

Knighted in 1969, he shared the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Ulf von Euler and Julius Axelrod “for their discoveries concerning the humoral transmitters in the nerve terminals and the mechanism for their storage, release and inactivation”. Married in 1945 to Marguerite Penly, with whom he had two sons, he kept refereeing papers long after retiring, and died in London on 20 April 2003, aged 92.