Bernard Katz

Bernard Katz was a German born British physician and biophysicist who discovered that neurotransmitter is released at nerve synapses in discrete packets, or quanta, rather than as a continuous flow, finding that the amount released is always an integral multiple of a fixed basic unit. This quantal hypothesis of synaptic transmission became a foundation of modern neuroscience. He shared the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Julius Axelrod and Ulf von Euler for their discoveries concerning the humoral transmitters in nerve terminals and the mechanism for their storage, release and inactivation. Katz trained at the University of Leipzig, earned his PhD at University College London in 1938, worked in Sydney with John Carew Eccles from 1938 to 1942, served as a radar officer in the Royal Australian Air Force during the Second World War, and then returned to University College London in 1946, where he was professor and head of the biophysics department until 1978. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1952 and was knighted in 1969.