Sir Bernard Katz

Even after retiring in 1978, Katz remained associated with the University College, London as emeritus professor.

Since childhood Katz was very fond of playing chess. He played the game remarkably well until the end.

Bernard Katz was on 26 March 1911, in Leipzig, Germany. His father, Max Katz, was a Jewish merchant of Russian origin, who left his homeland in 1904. His mother, Eugenie (Rabinowitz), was Polish. Bernard was the only child of his parents and he had a very unorthodox upbringing.

In 1917, the Bolsheviks seized the power in Russia and with that the Katz family lost their citizenship. They thus became stateless.

In 1920, nine-year-old Bernard had his first taste of discrimination when he was refused admission to Schiller Real Gymnasium because of his religion.

In 1921, he was admitted at König Albert Gymnasium. Here Bernard took up Latin and Greek because it allowed him more time to play chess at the local café. Nonetheless, he also acquired a good grade in mathematics.

In 1929, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig to study medicine. Soon after completing his preclinical examination Katz started research work under Martin Gildermeister. It earned him Siegfried Garten prize in 1933. Unfortunately, because of Nazi policies, the committee was forced to announce that the prize could not be given to any non-Aryan. He, however, received the prize money in private.

In 1939, Bernard Katz received the Carnegie Fellowship and with that he joined the laboratory of Australian neurophysiologist, John Carew Eccles, at the Kanematsu Institute of Sydney Medical School. During that period, he was also invited to give research lectures at the University of Sydney,

In 1941, while he was working in Australia, Katz became a naturalized British citizen and received his first legally valid passport. Next, in 1942, he received his doctoral degree and joined Royal Australian Air Force as a radar officer in New Guinea.

As the Second World War ended in 1945, Katz received an invitation from A.V. Hill asking him to return to University College of London. Accordingly, he went back to England in 1946 and joined UCL as an Assistant Director of Research in Biophysics and Henry Head Research Fellow.

At UCL, Katz mainly worked on the method, in which nerve impulse is transmitted from nerve fiber to muscle fiber and earned great distinction. In 1950, he was appointed as the Reader in Physiology at the University College London.

As Hill retired in 1952, Katz succeeded him as Professor of Biophysics, remaining in that position until 1978. During that period, he earned distinction both as the head of the department and also as an outstanding researcher.

All through his career Katz had mostly worked on functioning of nerves and muscles. However, he is best remembered for his ‘quantal hypothesis’, which helped to explain the fundamental physiological mechanism of transmitter release.

While working with frogs in 1950s, Katz along with Paul Fatt, observed that neurotransmitter (identified as acetylcholine) is released in the multi-molecular packets, known as ‘quanta’. On further experimentation, he realized that they correspond with synaptic vesicles in the motor nerve terminals.

Working with Ricardo Miledi in late 1960s, he advanced his hypothesis and established that exocytosis is triggered by influx of Ca2+, which in its turn is induced by depolarization. Later they measured the voltage noise induced in muscle by acetylcholine and deduced properties of single ion channels. The discovery led to the development of molecular neuroscience.

In addition to his scientific achievements, Katz also authored several books, which were admired as much for their contents as for his crisp, unpretentious writing style. These books are: ‘Electric Excitation of Nerve’ (1939), ‘Nerve, Muscle and Synapse’ (1966), and ‘The Release of Neural Transmitter Substances’ (1969).