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Bernard Katz
March 26, 1911 - April 20, 2003
From The Independent, Saturday 26
April 2003
Professor Sir Bernard Katz
Biophysicist who arrived in England with £4 and went on
to win a Nobel Prize
Bernard Katz was an icon of post-war biophysics. He was on
of the last of the generation of distinguished physiologists who were
refugees from the Third Reich and who contributed immeasurably t the
scientific reputation of their adopted country. In 1970 he won the Nobel
Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
He was born and brought up in Leipzig, though he was never a
German citizen. His father, Max, was a fur merchant who had left Russia in
1904, and met his wife, Eugenie Rabinowitz, who was of Polish origin, in
Germany. Until he was six, Katz was a citizen of Tsarist Russia, but then,
because of the Russian Revolution, became stateless, and remained so until
he was 30 when he became a naturalized British citizen.
In Leipzig, Katz was brought up in what he himself described
as a "completely 'unorthodox' and liberal way", but nevertheless had his
first experience of being an alien Jew in 1920, at the age of nine, when he
was refused entrance to the Schiller Real-Gymnasium, and consequently had a
classical education at the König Albert Gymnasium. There he chose to learn
Latin and Greek rather than the more mathematical option (because, he said,
it gave him more time to play chess in the cafes of Leipzig), though he
acquired a good level of mathematics anyway.
Despite his love of chess, and despite increasingly menacing
anti-Semitic experiences, he did well at school and went to the University
of Leipzigin 1929 to study medicine. After his preclinical exams he combined
part-time research (under Martin Gildermeister) with his under graduate
work, and for this work he was awarded the Siegfried Garten prize. This was
in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, and Gildermeister was forced to
announce publicly that the prize could not be given to a "non-Aryan"
student, though he later gave Katz the prize money in private. At some risk,
Katz decided to complete his medical degree in Leipzig, but not long after
graduating he set off for England, carrying his League of Nations
stateless-persons pass, a letter of recommendation from Martin Gildermeister
and £4.
His destination was the laboratory of A.V. Hill at
University College London. Hill was a remarkable man, not only a great
scientist (he had received the Nobel prize, with Otto Meyerhof, in 1922),
but also a statesman who took a large role in helping refugees in the
pre-war period. Katz described these first years in Hill's lab, between 1935
and 1939, as "the most inspiring period of my life", and said, "Hill's
personality had a profound influence on me." Shortly after getting his PhD,
and a month before the start of the Second World War, he left UCL for
Australia, where he worked with John Eccles, another renowned physiologist
of the time.
Katz remained in Australia from 1939 to 1945, and in 1941
became a naturalized British citizen, so obtaining his first real passport.
Soon after, he enlisted with the Royal Australian Air Force, and served as a
radar officer in New Guinea. Later he met Marguerite Penly, known as Rita,
who, incidentally, was not Jewish. They were married straight after the war.
A month after the wedding he got a telegram from A.V. Hill inviting him to
return to UCL as Henry Head Fellow of the Royal Society and assistant
director of research in biophysics. In 1952 he succeeded Hill as Professor
of Biophysics at UCL, and he headed a department of outstanding distinction
until 1978.
His work at UCL was concerned largely with the way in which
a nerve impulse is transmitted from a nerve fibre to a muscle fibre, as
occurs each time the brain "tells" a muscle to contract. The work of Henry
Dale and others had led to acceptance of the idea of "chemical
communications". This means that there is not a direct connection between
the nerve fibre and the muscle fibre, but when a nerve impulse reaches the
end of a nerve it releases a chemical, acetylcholine, which diffuses across
the very narrow gap between teh nerve ending and the muscle fibre, and
combines with protein molecules (receptors) in the muscle-fibre membrane.
Katz, with Paul Fatt, established that these receptors, when
stimulated by acetylcholine, open "aqueous pores" in the muscle membrane
that allow an electrical current (carried by sodium and other ions) to flow
into the cell. It is this current that eventually causes the muscle to
contract. The receptor proteins of this sort, which were later to be called
"ion channels", are the basis of all nervous activity and of much else
besides. Together with Ricardo Miledi and others, Katz established that
acetylcholine is not released in a continuous stream, but come in small
packets (quanta), each of which produces a very brief signal in the muscle
fibre.
His lat major works, published in the 1970s, gave the first
insight into how a single ion channel behaved, and paved the way for Bert
Sakmann, who was at UCL with Katz in the early 1970s, to record from one
single channel-work, done with Erwin Neher, that also got a Nobel prize in
1991.
At UCL all the important features of synaptic transmission
were established, and subsequently many of these principles have been found
to be true in the brain too. The influence of his work is inestimable, not
only in physiology, but also in pharmacology, in which he (and his fellow
refugee at UCL Heinz Schild) laid down some of the most important
fundamental principles. He was rewarded, among many other honours, by
election to the Royal Society in 1952 and 18 years later, by the Nobel
Prize, jointly with Ulf von Euler (of Sweden) and Julius Axelrod (of the
United States), "for their discoveries concerning the humoral transmitters
in the nerve terminals and the mechanism for their storage, release and
inactivation".
Surprisingly, BK - as he was known among his scientific
colleagues - himself supervised only five PhD students, John Nichols, Liam
Burke, Paul Fatt, Bob Martin and Donald Jenkinson, all of whom went on to do
eminent work. But his department became a Mecca for postdoctoral students
from all over the world. His influence on the training of a large number of
the world's greatest scientists was huge.
Although his seriousness could make him appear forbidding,
and presenting to him the first draft of a paper could be a "baptism of
fire", it was the universal experience of his colleagues that he was a
person with enormous enthusiasm, always willing to discuss with the most
junior of them the details of their work and to offer advice. There can be
few in the field of synaptic transmission and ion channels who have not
benefited from his wisdom.
Although Katz spoke little English when he first arrived at
UCL, his writing style was exemplary, and he was able and willing to correct
the execrable style adopted by some native speaker of English. His prose was
simple, straightforward and unpretentious, yet his papers show astonishing
prescience. He had an uncanny knack for picking the important part of a
problem, and to leave the rest of us dotting "i"s and crossing "t"s. Every
new entrant into the field should read his work from beginning to end.
DAVID COLQUHOUN
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