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| Nerve, Muscle, and Synapse, by Bernard Katz. |
Professor Katz... goes far beyond the first essentials to develop the subject in depth… What impresses me particularly is that each idea is pursued to the numerical level. Each theoretical development comes out in this form, in clearly stated problems worked through with the relevant numbers.One theme of this blog is to explore the intersection of biology and medicine with physics. I often highlight physicists, like myself, who have made the transition from physics to biology. Katz is an example of a scientist who made the less common transition from physiology and medicine to physics.
To explore this topic in more detail, I examined his memoirs published in The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography. Katz was born in 1911 in Leipzig, Germany. That made him a 21 year old Jew when Hitler took power, which explains why he spent most of his career in England.
In elementary school, Katz obtained a classical education, with an emphasis on Latin and Greek. He wrote
During my last three school years, we had to choose between a continuation of the classical linguistic course, and a mathematically and scientifically oriented curriculum. I chose the former … It was not the lack of natural science training that I later came to regret. This deficiency was made up quite satisfactorily by excellent elementary science teaching in the preclinical university course. But the weakness of my grounding in mathematics was something for which I have never been able to compensate.He went on to study medicine, getting his M.D. in 1934. In medical school, he studied physics with Peter Debye, mentioned several times in IPMB.
During my first year I had to make up for my total lack of knowledge in the natural sciences. The medical students joined the scientists in their elementary courses in botany, chemistry, physics, and zoology, in addition to the preclinical subjects of anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry. I found it an advantage not having taken science in high school. All the material I was presented with during my first year at the university was fresh and new, some of it taught by persons of the highest caliber, and there was a good deal that I found absolutely fascinating. I had the benefit of an outstanding physics teacher, the famous Peter Debye (who a few years later received a Nobel Prize in chemistry). He gave his lectures, accompanied by experimental demonstrations, every morning from 8 until 9. Debye was both a great scientist and a great showman who took visible pride in his lectures. He was a marvelous expositor of facts, ideas, and theories. Debye clearly enjoyed teaching as much as research, and he showed his delight in all the successful tricks that he demonstrated in class with a constant smile on his face.
I guess you don’t need a book like IPMB if you’ve got Peter Debey as your physics teacher.
Katz was also influenced by one of the best biological physicists ever, Hermann Helmholtz. This reminds me of the influence Isaac Asimov had on me at about the same stage in my education.
I was influenced strongly by the superb collection of Helmholtz's public lectures. In these, Helmholtz--one of the greatest experimental scientists of all time--explained difficult subjects with exemplary clarity.In medical school he became fascinated with electrophysiology, which at that time was one of biology’s more mathematical subjects.
I was attracted to neurophysiology at an early stage, from about 1930 onward. In those days, the establishment of the laws of electric excitation of nerve, and their precise mathematical formulation were regarded as a great thing… I felt it was fascinating that one could make accurate and repeatable measurements of electric excitability on living tissues and express the results by a simple mathematical equation. ..With Hitler’s rise, Katz emigrated to England and found a position in A. V. Hill’s laboratory.
Having myself been involved in the experimental tests, I can say that I found the work attractive and indeed fascinating for two quite different reasons. In the first place the work enabled one to make reproducible measurements of quite extraordinary accuracy with simple equipment. Secondly, although the verification of the theoretical equations was not by itself very fruitful, a number of discrepancies from the predictions of the simple theory gradually emerged which did have important consequences. Such discrepancies led to the recognition of the nonlinear characteristic of the nerve membrane, and of the occurrence of a regenerative voltage change even in the subthreshold range of membrane potentials (the local response), which in turn provided a clue to the mechanism whereby an impulse is initiated.
I came to London to join A.V. Hill's laboratory to serve my apprenticeship with him. That time, 1935 to 1939, was the most inspiring period of my life. Hill's personality had a profound influence on me.
Hill is known for his contributions to muscle physiology, and his work had a strong mathematical component. As a student, Hill had attended Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and was Third Wrangler on the Mathematical Tripos exam.
Katz also worked at Cambridge with Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, and it is Huxley who is known as one of the greatest mathematical biologists.
Finally, during World War II Katz worked on radar, a physics and math heavy subject.
In 1941 I obtained my British naturalization papers in Sydney and shortly afterwards managed to enlist with the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), first as a rookie, then graduating as a radar officer. Otto Schmitt had taught me some fairly advanced tricks that one could play with thermionic valves, and that helped me a great deal during my period as a radar trainee. But my four years in the RAAF taught me a great many more useful things, about electronics as well as about human beings…. During the last year of the war I was posted back to Sydney as a liaison officer at the Radiophysics Laboratory. This was quite an interesting place, housed within the University of Sydney and harboring a number of young physicists who later became Fellows of the Royal Society.
Having become a naturalised British citizen in 1941, he was accepted to join the Royal Australian Air Force in 1942 and served as a flight lieutenant in charge of running a mobile radar unit in the south-west Pacific until 1943. This posting was followed by a job back in Sydney for two years, developing radar at Sydney University’s Radio-Physics Laboratory.
To summarize, I am not sure exactly how physics and mathematics became so important in Katz’s research, but given the scientists he trained under and worked with, it’s hardly a surprise. In any case, I still find Katz’s book Nerve, Muscle, and Synapse useful now, sixty years after its first publication. And I’m quite comfortable classifying Bernard Katz as a biological physicist.
Bernard Katz, The Fenn Lecture, 1993
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