Bernard Katz - Life

Life

Born in Leipzig to a Jewish family, Germany, he was educated at the Albert Gymnasium in that city from 1921 to 1929 and went on to study medicine at the University of Leipzig. He graduated in 1934 and fled to Britain in February 1935, the rise of Hitler having made his Russian Jewish heritage dangerous. He went to work at University College London, initially under the tutelage of Archibald Vivian Hill. He finished his PhD in 1938 and won a Carnegie Fellowship to study with John Carew Eccles at Sydney Hospital. He was naturalised in 1941 and joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1942. He spent the war in the Pacific as a radar officer. He married Marguerite Penly in 1945 and returned to UCL as an assistant director in 1946. Back in England he also worked with the 1963 Nobel prize winners Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley. Katz was made a professor at UCL in 1952 and head of biophysics, he was also elected to the Royal Society. He stayed as head of biophysics until 1978 when he became emeritus professor. At the age of 92, he died in London on 20 April 2003.

Read more about this topic:  Bernard Katz

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    Because of the unusual remoteness of Russia, and because of nostalgia’s remaining throughout one’s life an insane companion, with whose heartrending oddities one is accustomed to put up in public, I feel no embarrassment in confessing to the sentimental stab of attachment to my first book.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

    Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.
    Albert Camus (1913–1960)