Stephen W. Kuffler

Stephen W. Kuffler

Stephen William Kuffler (born  August 24, 1913 in Táp , Austria-Hungary , †  October 11, 1980 in Woods Hole , Massachusetts ), born Wilhelm Kuffler , was an American neurobiologist of Austro-Hungarian origin. He worked from 1946 to 1958 at Johns Hopkins University and from 1959 until his death at Harvard University , and was particularly concerned with various aspects of the function of nerve cells . For his research achievements, he was accepted into the National Academy of Sciences in 1964 and the Royal Society in 1971 , as well as the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 1972 and the Dickson Prize in Medicine in 1974.

Life

Stephen Kuffler was born in 1913 in Táp, Hungary , and began studying medicine at the University of Vienna in 1932 , which he completed with a doctorate in December 1937 . After that he worked for a short time at the second medical clinic and in the department of pathology of the university before he went to England for a few months and in the summer of 1938 to Australia to the Sydney Hospital , where he worked at the Kanematsu Memorial Institute of Pathology and in the laboratory of the future Nobel Prize winner John Carew Eccles did research. There he also met the neurobiologist Bernard Katz , who had a major influence on his scientific interests. After his emigration he took the first name Stephen in 1938 .

After the end of the Second World War , he first worked at the University of Chicago from autumn 1945 , before he was appointed professor of visual physiology and biophysics at the Institute of Ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University Medical Faculty in 1946 . In 1959, at the invitation of Otto Krayer, he and his working group moved to the Department of Pharmacology at Harvard University , where he founded the world's first independent department of neurobiology seven years later and until his death as a professor of neurophysiology and neuropharmacology or from 1966 for neurobiology. In addition to his work at Harvard, he and his group regularly spent summer research stays at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole , Massachusetts, and from 1967 to 1971 at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies .

Stephen Kuffler was married from 1943 and has four children. His daughter Eugénie Kuffler is a well-known composer, flautist and dancer. He became an American citizen in 1954. He died in Woods Hole in 1980 as a result of a heart attack after a long swim in Buzzards Bay . His academic students included David H. Hubel and Torsten N. Wiesel , who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine a year after his death .

Scientific work

Characteristic of the research of Stephen Kuffler, who published around 90 scientific publications , was the combination of different methods from the fields of physiology , biochemistry , histology , neuroanatomy and electron microscopy to deal with neurobiological questions. He was particularly concerned with the function of nerve cells and examined, among other things, the conduction of excitation at the motor endplate and other synapses as well as the role of the nervous system in the contraction of muscle fibers . Further of his work concerned studies on signal transmission in the ganglia of the retina , on the stimulation and inhibition of mechanoreceptors, and on the effect of GABA as a neurotransmitter .

Awards

In recognition of his scientific achievements, Stephen Kuffler was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960 , the National Academy of Sciences in 1964 , the American Philosophical Society in 1978 and the Royal Society in 1971 as a foreign member . In addition, he was a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences , the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and, from 1980, an honorary member of the Austrian Physiological Society.

The University of Bern (1964), Yale University (1972), Washington University in St. Louis (1974), the University of London (1974), the University of Chicago (1977), the University of Pierre and Marie Curie (1977) and the University of Oxford (1980) awarded him an honorary doctorate . He also received the Passano Award in 1971 , the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 1972 , the Ralph W. Gerard Prize in 1978 and the Dickson Prize in Medicine in 1974 .

Named after Stephen Kuffler are the Stephen W. Kuffler Lecture in Neurobiology , an honorary lecture held at Harvard University, as well as the Stephen W. Kuffler Chair in Biology , a chair at the University of California, San Diego , and the Stephen W. Kuffler Fellowship Fund at the Marine Biological Laboratory.

Works

• The Physiology of Neuroglial Cells. In: Results of Physiology, Biological Chemistry and Experimental Pharmacology . Volume 57. Berlin, Heidelberg and New York 1966, pp. 1–90 (as co-author)
• From Neuron to Brain: A Cellular Approach to the Function of the Nervous System. Sunderland 1976, 1984; further editions under the title From Neuron to Brain: A Cellular and Molecular Approach to the Function of the Nervous System. Sunderland 1992, 2000, 2012; Spanish edition, Barcelona 1982 (as co-author)
• Neurotransmission, Neurotransmitters, and Neuromodulators. Cambridge and New York 1980 (as co-editor)

literature

• John G. Nicholls: Stephen W. Kuffler. 1913-1980. In: Biographical Memoirs. Volume 74. National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC 1998, ISBN 0-309-08281-1 , pp. 193-208
• Bernard Katz : Stephen William Kuffler. August 24, 1913 - October 11, 1980. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 28/1982. The Royal Society, pp. 224-259, ISSN  0080-4606

Further publications

• UJ McMahan: Steve: Remembrances of Stephen W. Kuffler. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland 1990, ISBN 0-87-893516-9
• In Appreciation of Stephen W. Kuffler. In: Journal of Neuroscience. 1 (1) / 1981. Society for Neuroscience, pp. 1/2, ISSN  0270-6474
• Timothy S. Harrison: Five Scientists at Johns Hopkins in the Modern Evolution of Neuroscience. In: Journal of the History of the Neurosciences. 9 (2) / 2000. Psychology Press / Taylor & Francis, pp. 165-179, ISSN  0964-704X (in particular section "Neurobiology: Stephen William Kuffler at Johns Hopkins, 1946-1958", pp. 172-176)
• W. Maxwell Cowan, Donald H. Harter, Eric R. Kandel: The Emergence of Modern Neuroscience: Some Implications for Neurology and Psychiatry. In: Annual Review of Neuroscience. 23/2000. Annual Reviews, pp. 343–391, ISSN  0147-006X (in particular section "Stephen Kuffler and the Formation, At Harvard, of the First Neurobiology Department in the United States", pp. 346/347)