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| British
biophysicist. He shared the 1970 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine
for work on the biochemistry of the transmission and control of signals
in the nervous system, vital in the search for remedies for nervous and
mental disorders. Katz was born in Leipzig, studied medicine at the university there, and then did postgraduate work at University College, London. Having done research in Australia 1939-42, he then served in the Royal Australian Air Force until the end of World War II, after which he returned to the UK. He spent the rest of his academic career at University College, London, becoming professor 1952. In the 1940s, Katz joined in the Nobel-prizewinning research of Alan Hodgkin on the electrochemical behaviour of nerve membranes. During the 1950s, Katz found that minute amounts of acetylcholine were randomly released by nerve endings at the neuromuscular junction, giving rise to very small electrical potentials; he also found that the size of the potential was always a multiple of a certain minimum value. These findings led him to suggest that acetylcholine was released in discrete 'packets' (analogous to quanta) of a few thousand molecules each, and that these packets were released relatively infrequently while a nerve was at rest but very rapidly when an impulse arrived at the neuromuscular junction. |