Otto Loewi (German: [ˈɔtoː ˈløːvi] ; 3 June 1873 – 25 December 1961) was a German-born pharmacologist and psychobiologist who discovered the role of acetylcholine as an endogenous neurotransmitter. For this discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1936, which he shared with Sir Henry Dale, who was a lifelong friend that helped to inspire the neurotransmitter experiment. Loewi met Dale in 1902 when spending some months in Ernest Starling's laboratory at University College, London.
Biography Loewi was born in Frankfurt, Germany on June 3, 1873, in a Jewish family. He went to study medicine at the University of Strasbourg, Germany (now part of France), in 1891, where he attended courses by famous professors Gustav Schwalbe, Oswald Schmiedeberg, and Bernhard Naunyn among others. He received his medical doctoral degree in 1896. He also was a member of the fraternity Burschenschaft Germania Strassburg. Subsequently, he worked with Martin Freund at Goethe University of Frankfurt and with Franz Hofmeister in Strasbourg. From 1897 to 1898, he served as an assistant to Carl von Noorden, clinician at the City Hospital in Frankfurt. Soon, however, after seeing the high mortality in countless cases of far-advanced tuberculosis and pneumonia, left without any treatment because of lack of therapy, he decided to drop his intention to become a clinician and instead to carry out research in basic medical science, in particular pharmacology. In 1898, he became an assistant of Professor Hans Horst Meyer, the renowned pharmacologist at the University of Marburg. During his first years in Marburg, Loewi's studies were in the field of metabolism. As a result of his work on the action of phlorhizin, a glucoside provoking glycosuria, and another one on nuclein metabolism in man, he was appointed «Privatdozent» (lecturer) in 1900. Two years later he published his paper «Über Eiweisssynthese im Tierkörper» (on protein synthesis in the animal body), proving that animals are able to rebuild their proteins from their degradation products, the amino acids – an essential discovery with regard to nutrition.
In 1902, Loewi was a guest researcher in Ernest Starling's laboratory in London, where he met his lifelong friend Henry Dale. In 1903, he accepted an appointment at the University of Graz in Austria, where he would remain until being forced out of the country in 1938. In 1905, Loewi became Associate Professor at Meyer's laboratory and received Austrian citizenship. In 1909 he was appointed to the Chair of Pharmacology in Graz. He had also been a professor at the University of Vienna. He married Guida Goldschmiedt (1889–1958) in 1908. They had three sons and a daughter. He was the last Jew hired by the University between 1903 and the end of the war. In 1921, Loewi investigated how vital organs respond to chemical and electrical stimulation. He also established their relative dependence on epinephrine for proper function. Consequently, he learnt how nerve impulses are transmitted by chemical messengers. The first chemical neurotransmitter that he identified was acetylcholine. After being arrested, along with two of his sons, on the night of the German invasion of Austria, March 11, 1938, Loewi was released after three months on condition that he "voluntarily" relinquish all his possessions, including his research, to the Nazis. He arrived to Britain in September 1938 and shortly afterwards he was offered a visiting professorship at the Université libre de Bruxelles via the Francqui Foundation. After teaching one semester in the first half of 1939 and going on vacation in England Loewi did not return to Brussels in September due to the outbreak of World War II. Loewi worked at the Nuffield Institute for Medical Research affiliated with Oxford before accepting an offer of a tenured research professor position at the New York University College of Medicine. He arrived to the US in June 1940 and was joined by his wife only in early 1941 (she was not allowed to leave earlier). In 1946, Loewi became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1954, he became a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He died in New York City on December 25, 1961. Shortly after Loewi's death in late 1961, his youngest son bestowed the gold Nobel medal on the Royal Society in London. He gave the Nobel diploma to the University of Graz in Austria in 1983, where it currently resides, along with a bronze copy of a bust of Loewi. The original of the bust is at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Loewi's summer home from his arrival in the US until his death.
Research
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