Bert Sakmann studied at the universities of Tübingen and Munich,
graduating in 1967. Much of his professional life has been spent in
various branches of the Max-Planck-Institut. A British Council Fellowship
took him in 1971 to the Department of Biophysics of University College
London to work with Bernard Katz, co-recipient in 1970 of the Nobel
Prize in Medicine for discoveries concerning the humoral transmitters
in the nerve terminals and the mechanism for their storage, release
and inactivation.
Bert Sakmann’s admiration for his supervisor was to find tangible
expression in 1993, through the establishment of the Bernard Katz Minerva
Center for Cell Biophysics, a joint venture of the Max Planck Institute
for Medical Research in Heidelberg where Bert Sakmann is Director, the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Technicon-Israel Institute of
Technology in Haifa. He also established the annual Bernard Katz prize
lecture.
In 1974, he obtained his PhD from the University of Göttingen
and with Erwin Neher, at the Max-Planck-Institut für Biophysikalische
Chemie, began the work which was to revolutionise cellular biology and
neuroscience and win them the 1991 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine.
The patch clamp technique involves attaching tiny pipettes directly
to a cell, making possible very precise measurements of the electrical
flow. This allows researchers to measure the electrical current going
in and out of the ion channels of a cell.
His many significant discoveries have revolutionised our knowledge
of the workings of cells, particularly nerve cells. Professor Sakmann's
important discovery of the patch-clamp technique for measuring electrical
activity and chemical flow across cell membranes resulted in a technique
now used in laboratories throughout the world. As well as his numerous
articles, Bert Sakmann has jointly edited “Single Channel Recording”.
His subsequent work has led to the development of many important drugs
used for diseases of the circulation and nervous system. This research
identified the very sophisticated interplay of channels across the membranes
of cells which regulate the flow of sodium, potassium and calcium ions
in response to chemical signals acting on the cells during nerve stimulation.
More recently he identified mechanisms that lead to experience dependent
changes in the connections between nerve cells in the brain.
Bert Sakmann’s work has attracted many prestigious awards, among
them the Spencer and GrossHorwitz prizes and Feldberg Prize of the Feldberg
Foundation of London. In 1999 he was appointed an Eminent Scholar of
the University of Melbourne.
Professor
Bert Sakmann 