Otto Loewi

German born pharmacologist whose discovery of acetylcholine helped enhance medical therapy. The discovery earned for him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1936 which he shared with Sir Henry Dale, whom he met in 1902 when spending some months in Ernest Starling's laboratory at University College, London. He has been referred to as the "Father of Neuroscience."

After Loewi graduated in medicine (1896) from the German University (now the University of Strasbourg), he studied and taught in European universities, becoming professor of pharmacology at Graz, Austria, in 1909.

After being arrested, along with two of his sons, on the night of the German invasion of Austria, 11 March 1938, Loewi was released on condition that he "voluntarily" relinquish all his possessions, including his research, to the Nazis. Loewi moved to the United States in 1940, where he became a research professor at the New York University College where he remained until his death.

His neurological researches (1921–26) provided the first proof that chemicals were involved in the transmission of impulses from one nerve cell to another and from neuron to the responsive organ. He and his colleagues, by stimulating the nerves in the heart of a frog, slowed the heart’s rate of contraction. The fluid perfusing this heart was allowed to perfuse a second heart in which the nerves were not stimulated; the second heart slowed in rate also, indicating the presence of a reactive substance in the fluid. This substance was shown to be acetylcholine, whose physiological properties Dale had described comprehensively in 1914. Acetylcholine was subsequently isolated from animal tissue by Dale and Harold Dudley in 1929.

In addition to researches on the nervous system, Loewi studied diabetes and the action of the drugs digitalis and epinephrine. He devised Loewi’s test for the detection of pancreatic disease.

He died on 25 December 1961, aged 88, in New York City.