How the nerves reached the muscle: Bernard Katz, Stephen W. Kuffler, and John C. Eccles—Certain implications of exile for the development of twentieth-century neurophysiology

ABSTRACT

This article explores the work by Bernard Katz (1911–2003), Stephen W. Kuffler (1913–1980), and John C. Eccles (1903–1997) on the nerve–muscle junction as a milestone in twentieth-century neurophysiology with wider scientific implications. The historical question is approached from two perspectives: (a) an investigation of twentieth-century solutions to a longer physiological dispute and (b) an examination of a new kind of laboratory and academic cooperation. From this vantage point, the work pursued in Sydney by Sir John Carew Eccles’ team on the neuromuscular junction is particularly valuable, since it contributed a central functional element to modern physiological understanding regarding the function and structure of the human and animal nervous system. The reflex model of neuromuscular action had already been advanced by neuroanatomists such as Georg Prochaska (1749–1820) in Bohemia since the eighteenth century. It became a major component of neurophysiological theories during the nineteenth century, based on the law associated with the names of François Magendie (1783–1855) in France and Charles Bell (1774–1842) in Britain regarding the functional differences of the sensory and motor spinal nerves. Yet, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that both the histological and the neurophysiological understanding of the nerve–muscle connection became entirely understood and the chemical versus electrical transmission further elicited as the mechanisms of inhibition. John C. Eccles, Bernard Katz, and Stephen W. Kuffler helped to provide some of the missing links for modern neurophysiology. The current article explores several of their scientific contributions and investigates how the context of forced migration contributed to these interactions in contingently new ways.

KEYWORDS:

• John C. Eccles (1903–1997)
• forced migration
• global history
• international relations
• Bernard Katz (1911–2003)
• Stephen W. Kuffler (1913–1980)
• neurophysiology
• twentieth-century history

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and constructive criticisms on an earlier version of this article. He gratefully acknowledges the support of the Mackie Family Collection in the History of Neuroscience, the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, and the O’Brien Institute for Public Health (all with the University of Calgary) and wishes to thank the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for an Open Operating Grant (CIHR No. EOG–123680) award that made the research for this article possible. He acknowledges access to the Eccles Nachlass at the Heinrich Heine University of Duesseldorf, Germany, kindly permitted by Em. Professor Alfons Labisch. Professor Tilly Tansey at Queen Mary University, Em. Professor Thomas Sears at University College London, and Em. Professor John Stein at Oxford University (all from the United Kingdom) are thanked for their assistance and providing personal recollections on Sir John Eccles’ life and exchanges with his research associates and collaborators. Finally, the author is grateful to Mr. Keith Hann (Calgary) for the meticulous adjustment of the English language of the article.

Notes

¹ Interdisciplinarity is here defined based on the interactions and contributions of several disciplines from neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, and neurology, etc. to the new research area of the neurosciences around the middle of the twentieth century. This process included historical concepts, practices, and organizational patterns already used in early brain research centers, thus legitimizing the employment of the term of “neuroscience” as a descriptive term to identify contemporary research traditions. These displayed themselves largely as an interdisciplinary problem field. It was based on the intricate forms of research collaboration and coordination across multiple scientific disciplines (cf. Koetter & Balsiger, 1999).

² These wider relations—both scientific and personal—thus transcend the forced migration development beyond its final U.S. or British port of call, and help one to appreciate that the simplistic idea of an outright “Americanization” of the neuroscience interpretation (Magoun, 2002) was in fact emergent from several national research traditions interacting on a global scale.

³ See also Paris Office 1935, April 11 to October 1935 (List of Fellowships provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, pp. 73–75) sent to the RF New York Headquarter, Rockefeller Archive Center, 717A/1.1/p. 74 (“special research support”).

⁴ It was particularly the vision of the American neurophysiologist Francis O. Schmitt (1903–1995), at the end of the 1950s, to overcome pertinent constraints in research and training within the American medical and science faculties, when he introduced the notion of the “neurosciences” in the planning for what was then called the Neuroscience Research Program (NRP) with its month-long Interdisciplinary Studies Programs (ISPs) at the Boulder campus of the University of Colorado. Disciplinary margins had still been prevalent at that time, originating from nineteenth-century forms of research organization in physics, physiology, and pathology, which is observed here when the particular training backgrounds of the respective German-speaking émigrés are taken into account (cf. Stahnisch, 2010).

⁵ Bernhard Katz contacted the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning in London in 1933, asking for assistance to find a position overseas in the British Empire, after the Nazis began ousting Jewish scientists and academics from their positions in Germany from April onwards. Eventually, through the influence of Charles Sherrington (1857–1952) and A. V. Hill (1886–1977), John C. Eccles declared his willingness to accept Katz in his laboratory at the Kanematsu Memorial Institute in Sydney, Australia. Society for the Protection of Science and Learning file on Bernhard Katz (I.20.18 Physiology; MSS. S.P.S.L. 416-19), Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, United Kingdom.

⁶ The history of the discoveries on the nervous endplate of the neuromuscular junction during the 1930s and 1940s by Eccles and his coworkers in Australia and New Zealand is concisely described in Finger (2000, p. 236f.; see also Eccles & Kuffler, 1941a, pp. 402–417, and 1941b, pp. 486–506.

⁷ Over and above, Magendie was an “all-round” laboratory investigator who studied many body systems, including the heart, blood vessels, and liver, and who conducted research over breathtakingly long periods. For example, his work on absorption in the intestines, lymphatic, and venous systems stretched more than 40 years (from 1809 to 1850) altogether (Stahnisch, 2003, 2005, pp. 397–425).

⁸ The contemporary German terminology would have understood Fuerstner’s disciplinary role as that of a neuropsychiatrist (“Gehirnpsychiater”), who based all of the causes of mental illness on the anatomical and pathological changes of the human brain. Jolly, Friedrich, Letter (no day given, 1895) to Carl Fuerstner, Archives Départementales à Strasbourg, AL 103 /No. 1158 /Pa. 239, Collection on the Medical Faculty, Clinic of Psychiatry, vol. V (January 1894–August 1901), n.p.

⁹ “I [Katz] was particularly attracted to neurophysiology as a field, already since 1930. In those days, the discovery and understanding of the Laws of Electrical Nervous Stimulation […] were seen as a major area [als eine grosse Sache]” (Katz, 1936, pp. 199–221).

¹⁰ It is remarkable that he received the University of Leipzig’s Siegfried Garten Prize despite the hostile political climate; that the submission was made anonymously clearly helped him get around the new anti-Semitic resentments at his college. When it was discovered, however, that a “non-Aryan” student had won the most prestigious undergraduate prize of the institution, he was ultimately refused the award money (Weiss, Steiner, & Steiner, 1995, pp. 76–90).

¹¹ It is amazing to observe—and it speaks to the high commitment of this medical scientist—that he continued to write up his research from Leipzig and London, even while cruising the Pacific on an Australian reconnaissance ship. By way of military mail and telegrams, he would send off his manuscripts or revise paper proofs, describing his academic affiliation as “Australian Battleship—somewhere in the Pacific, 1942” (Katz & Schmitt, 1942, pp. 369–371).

¹² See the file for the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning on Bernhard Katz (I.20.18 Physiology; MSS. S.P.S.L. 416-19) in the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, United Kingdom.

¹³ About a decade later, in 1959, Professor Otto Krayer (1899–1982), former Head of the Department of Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, offered Kuffler and Hubel an invitation to relocate their laboratory and coworkers to Boston. Krayer was likewise a former German-speaking refugee and, in fact, was the only academic in Nazi Germany who had refused outright to take the vacant position of a released Jewish professor vis-à-vis the Reich’s Ministry of Education in 1933, since he saw it as a “great injustice done to his Jewish academic colleagues.” Interviews: Alan Gregg. Paris, Thursday 24, 1934. Rockefeller Archive Center, 717A/1.1/11/73/p. 74f.

¹⁴ Although their laboratory locations were several kilometers removed from the university’s main campus, John Eccles as well as members of the institute and trainees could use the tram to get around and to attend meetings and lectures at the university’s pathology department. For instance, Kanematsu Institute members lectured at the university’s physiology department and hence tried to transcend the “anti-research” attitude that they generally perceived at Australian and New Zealand universities (Katz, 1996 pp. 377–379; Bennett, 2005, pp. 36–38).

¹⁵ Seymour S. Kety: Analysis of National Institutes of Health (NIH) Program Activities. Program Description Sheet (R.P.C. – 1 December 1955). National Institutes of Health: Annual Report of the Basic Research Program, NIMH-NIMDB. Bethesda, MD: 1954, p. 1.

¹⁶ Having received her scientific doctorate from Harvard in the United States, it might come as no surprise that she readily extended a deep hospitality and cordial friendship to Eccles’ global academic family (Todman, 2008, pp. 972–977).

¹⁷ See also the Letter from Charles Scott Sherrington to John C. Eccles on April 3, 1937 at the Kanematsu Institute, Sydney, where he reinforces his view that “there seems to be evolving [the view] about ‘electrical transmission’” (p. 3). Eccles Nachlass at the Heinrich-Heine Universitaet Duesseldorf, Germany.

¹⁸ The author is indebted to Tilly Tansey at Queen Mary University and Tom Sears at University College London for their hospitality and meeting in the summer of 2015 in London, England, to discuss their recollections of Sir John Eccles and acquaintance with Sir Karl Popper, as well as sharing their insights into the development of the Eccles–Popper friendship and the close exchanges since 1945, intensified after the 1960s (following Eccles’ retirement from neuroscientific laboratory work). At first, collaboration began at a visit to the University of Otago in May, 1945, when Eccles on invitation took the notes of Popper’s five lectures and two informal talks that they discussed and about which they personally exchanged (Penny, 2012, p. 15). Also see the Letter of John C. Eccles to Charles Scott Sherrington on Nov. 18, 1945 in Bourneville, England, mentioning that “Popper takes any interest in that borderland between psychosis + physiology, which I [Eccles] used to be attracted to ever thereafter.” (p. 2) Eccles Nachlass at the Heinrich-Heine Universitaet Duesseldorf, Germany.

¹⁹ Personal interview with a former director of a neuroscience-related Max Planck Institute (who wished to be anonymous) of the Federal Republic of Germany, November 14, 2003 (mini-cassette; circ. 183).