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:

    Whenever [Leonard Bernstein] entered or exited a country he would fill in on his passport form not composer or conductor, but musician. Of course people in the press spent a lot of Lenny’s life telling him what he should have done; he should have been a concert pianist, he should have composed more.... And people wouldn’t let him live his own life. But he created his own career, in his own image.
    John Mauceri (b. 1945)

    There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    All my life I’ve been running, from welfare officers, thugs, my father. See, there they are [the killers]. There on the bridge. I’m a dead man. Nosseros told me that. He told me. He said, “You got it all, but you’re a dead man, Harry Fabian.”
    Jo Eisinger, and Jules Dassin. Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark)