Erwin Neher was born in Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria, in March 1944 and raised in Buchloe, 70km (40 miles) west of Munich. His mother was a teacher and his father an accountant in a local dairy, so family life for Erwin and his two older sisters was not so much affected by the war. He attended a catholic school in Mindelheim, where physics and mathematics became favourite subjects. Tying these to his interest in living things, the young Erwin decided to become a biophysicist. In 1963, he entered the Technical University in Munich, studying physics, and in 1966 won a scholarship to study in the US at the University of Wisconsin, where he worked on low angle X-ray scattering. He returned to Munich in 1967 with an MSc, seeking a more biology-oriented PhD project, preferably related to nerve excitation. He joined the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, where Hans Dieter Lux was investigating synaptic mechanisms in snails. It was as a result of the problems using voltage-clamp on snail neurones that Neher and Lux came up with the idea of patch-clamp, using small suction pipettes, to measure the electrical flow.
It was also there that Neher fi rst met Bert Sakmann, with whom he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. They were parted when Sakmann went to London to work with Bernard Katz, but met again at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, now in Göttingen, in 1973. Neher was working with single ion channel recording in artifi cial membranes; Sakmann had experience on the neuromuscular junction. The pair agreed to collaborate, aiming at the measurement of single ion channel currents, which involved developing and refining the patch-clamp technique until they were using a pipette one-thousandth of a millimetre in diameter, fitted with an electrode to detect the flow of ions through a single channel in the cell membranes.
Despite Neher’s postdoctoral move to the University of Washington in Seattle and, later, to Yale University, the pair continued to liaise and published their single channel records, and the patch-clamp technique, in 1976. Neher returned to the Max Planck Institute that year and he and Sakmann were invited to run ‘Young Investigator Laboratories’, attracting postdoctoral fellows and perfecting and expanding their technique. Their discoveries enabled the development of specifi c drug therapies for such diseases as diabetes, cystic fi brosis, epilepsy, and cardiovascular and neuromuscular disorders. In 1983 Neher was made director, and Sakmann head, of the Institute’s membrane biophysics department. The pair have received numerous awards, often shared, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the highest honour awarded in German research. Neher met his wife, Eva-Maria, in the laboratory. They married in 1978 and have five children.
This text and the picture of the Nobel Laureate were taken from the book: "NOBELS. Nobel Laureates photographed by Peter Badge" (WILEY-VCH, 2008).
Picture: © Peter Badge/ Foundation Lindau Nobelprizewinners Meetings at Lake Constance |