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Press Release: The 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine
KAROLINSKA INSTITUTETOctober 1970
Karolinska Institutet has decided to
award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1970 jointly
to
Bernard Katz, Ulf von Euler and Julius
Axelrod
for their discoveries concerning "the humoral
transmitters in the nerve terminals and the mechanisms for their
storage, release and inactivation".
The discoveries which
this year's Nobel laureates have made have given us answer to
questions of fundamental importance for the understanding of the
mechanism underlying the transmission between the nerve cells, i.e.
at the so-called synapses, and between the nerve terminals and the
so-called effector organs, for instance between the motor nerve
fibres and the muscle fibres which they innervate. The transmission
between the nerve cells, which radically differs from the mechanisms
underlying the impulse transmission in the nerve fibres, is mediated
by chemical substances, so-called neurotransmitters, which carry the
message from one cell to the other. The three scientists have been
working independently of each other, but their discoveries all
contribute in solving principal questions concerning the
neurotransmitters, their storage, release and
inactivation.
Sir Bernard Katz' discoveries concerning
the mechanism for the release of the transmitter acetylcholine from
the nerve terminals at the nerve-muscle junction, under the
influence of the nerve impulses, are fundamental not only for the
understanding of the so-called cholinergic transmission, but are
also of primary importance for our knowledge about the synaptic
transmission between the nerve cells in the central nervous system.
Professor Ulf von Euler has discovered that the
substance noradrenaline serves as neurotransmitter at the nerve
terminals of the sympathetic nervous system. He has also shown how
this substance is stored in small nerve granules within the nerve
fibres of this system.
Dr. Julius Axelrod's
discoveries concern the mechanisms which regulate the formation of
this important transmitter in the nerve cells and the mechanisms
which are involved in the inactivation of noradrenaline, partly
under the influence of an enzyme discovered by himself.
von
Euler's and Axelrod's discoveries have not only increased our
knowledge about the transmission in the sympathetic nervous system,
they also form the basis for the understanding of the transmission
in the central nervous system and its pharmacology. Thus in a very
significant way, the laureates have presented basic data about the
physical and chemical mechanisms of the synaptic transmission and
thus given us basic information about how the messages are mediated
between nerve cells. Their discoveries concerning these regulatory
mechanisms in the nervous system are fundamental in neurophysiology
and neuropharmacology and have greatly stimulated the search for
remedies against nervous and mental disturbances. |
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1969
