Otto Loewi
Otto Loewi | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | December 25, 1961 | (aged 88)
Citizenship |
|
Alma mater | University of Strasbourg |
Known for | Acetylcholine |
Spouse |
Guida Goldschmiedt
(m. 1908; died 1958) |
Children | 4 |
Awards | |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Psychobiology |
Institutions | University of Vienna University of Graz |
Otto Loewi (German:
Biography
Loewi was born in Frankfurt, Germany on June 3, 1873 in a Jewish family. He went to study medicine at the University of Strasbourg, Germany (now part of France) in 1891, where he attended courses by famous professors Gustav Schwalbe, Oswald Schmiedeberg, and Bernhard Naunyn among others. He received his medical doctoral degree in 1896. He also was a member of the fraternity Burschenschaft Germania Strassburg.[6]
Subsequently, he worked with
In 1902 Loewi was a guest researcher in Ernest Starling's laboratory in London, where he met his lifelong friend Henry Dale.
In 1903, he accepted an appointment at the University of Graz in Austria, where he would remain until being forced out of the country in 1938. In 1905, Loewi became Associate Professor at Meyer's laboratory and received Austrian citizenship. In 1909 he was appointed to the Chair of Pharmacology in Graz. He had also been a professor at the University of Vienna.[8]
He married Guida Goldschmiedt (1889-1958) in 1908. They had three sons and a daughter. He was the last Jew hired by the University between 1903 and the end of the war.
In 1921, Loewi investigated how vital organs respond to
After being arrested, along with two of his sons, on the night of the
Shortly after Loewi's death in late 1961, his youngest son bestowed the gold Nobel medal on the
Research
Before Loewi's experiments, it was unclear whether signaling across the
Loewi's famous experiment, published in 1921, largely answered this question. He dissected out of frogs two beating hearts: one with the vagus nerve which controls heart rate attached, the other heart on its own. Both hearts were bathed in a saline solution (i.e. Ringer's solution). By electrically stimulating the vagus nerve, Loewi made the first heart beat slower. Then, Loewi took some of the liquid bathing the first heart and applied it to the second heart. The application of the liquid made the second heart also beat slower, proving that some soluble chemical released by the vagus nerve was controlling the heart rate. He called the unknown chemical Vagusstoff, naming it after the nerve and the German word for substance. It was later found that this chemical corresponded to acetylcholine. His 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. It paved the way for the understanding that the electrical signaling event (action potential) causes a chemical event (release of neurotransmitter from synapses) that is ultimately the effector on the tissue.
Loewi's investigations "On an augmentation of adrenaline release by cocaine" and "On the connection between digitalis and the action of calcium" stimulated a considerable body of research in the years following their publication.
He also clarified two mechanisms of therapeutic importance: the blockade and the augmentation of nerve action by certain drugs.
Loewi is also known for the means by which the idea for his experiment came to him. On Easter Saturday 1921, he dreamed of an experiment that would prove once and for all that transmission of nerve impulses was chemical, not electrical. He woke up, scribbled the experiment onto a scrap of paper on his night-stand, and went back to sleep.
The next morning, he found, to his horror, that he couldn't read his midnight scribbles. That day, he said, was the longest day of his life, as he could not remember his dream. That night, however, he had the same dream. This time, he immediately went to his lab to perform the experiment.[10] From that point on, the consensus was that the Nobel was not a matter of "if" but of "when."
Thirteen years later, Loewi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with Sir Henry Hallett Dale.[11][12]
Loewi's mydriatic test
Loewi observed that by removing the pancreas from dogs, it gave them an experimental form of
Awards and honours
- 1936: Nobel Prize for Medicine (with Henry Hallett Dale)
- Honorary doctorates from New York University, Yale University, University of Graz and the University of Frankfurt
- Physiology Prize of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Bologna
- Lieben Prize of the Academy of Vienna
- 1944: Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh
- Honorary member of The Physiological Society in London, Harvey Society in New York and the Società Italiana di Biologia Sperimentale
- Corresponding member of the Biological Societyof Vienna, and the Society for the Advancement of Science in Marburg.
- Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldinain Halle.
- Elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1954[4]
- 1957: Schmiedeberg badge of the German Pharmacological Society
- 1959: Austrian Medal for Science and Art
- 1959: Honorary Ring of the city of Graz
- A street, "Otto Loewi Gasse" was named after him in the parish of St. Peter, Graz, Austria.
See also
References
- S2CID 54244017.
- PMID 4587917.
- PMID 4583680.
- ^ S2CID 73367459.
- ^ PMC 2248292.
- ^ a b c "Otto Loewi - Biographical". Retrieved 23 Apr 2014.
- ^ Loewi, Otto. 1987. Retrieved 11 March 2016.
{{cite book}}
:|website=
ignored (help) - S2CID 73201525.
- ^ The Chemical Languages of the Nervous System. History of Scientists and Substances. Josef Donnerer, Fred Lembeck. S Karger AG 2006 ISBN 3-8055-8004-5.
- – via Springer.
- ^ "Otto Loewi Papers 1929-1956". National Library of Medicine.
- ^ "Otto Loewi Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence 1944-1960". National Library of Medicine.
- S2CID 44725200.
- ^ Bailey, Hamilton (1927). Demonstrations of physical signs in clinical surgery (1st ed.). Bristol: J. Wright and Sons, Ltd. p. 143.
- PMID 20769894.
- OCLC 605317343.
- .
External links
- Otto Loewi on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1936 The Chemical Transmission of Nerve Action
- Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1922–1941, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1965.
- ISBN 0-8385-7701-6
- From the Workshop of Discoveries Porter Lecture at the University of Kansas, 1953 (University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, 1953). Full-text PDF file.