Hans Kosterlitz

Hans Walter Kosterlitz (27 April 1903 to 26 October 1996) was a German-born British biochemist, best known as one of the key discoverers of the endorphins. Born in Berlin, he studied medicine at the University of Berlin, graduating in 1928, and worked at the Charite hospital until 1933, when the Nazi civil service law, which applied to people of Jewish ancestry, forced him to leave Germany. He took up research on carbohydrate metabolism in Aberdeen, Scotland, where he rose from teaching fellow to lecturer, senior lecturer and reader. In 1968 Aberdeen created a Department of Pharmacology headed by Kosterlitz as professor, and in 1973 he became director of the university's drug addiction research unit. His key experiment used electrically stimulated mouse vas deferens, whose contractions were inhibited by opiates and restored by an antagonist such as naloxone, and the same preparation later showed that extracts of pig brain contained endogenous opioids. His son John Michael Kosterlitz won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics.