Erwin Neher
Neher, Erwin (1944-), a German biophysicist, shared the 1991 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Bert Sakmann for developing the “patch clamp,” a revolutionary device that enables scientists to examine the transmission of signals that command and control cells. By illuminating the underlying causes of various conditions, the patch clamp technique revolutionized modern biology and facilitated research.
Neher, the son of a dairy company administrator, grew up in the small Bavarian town of Buchloe. He studied physics at the Technical University in Munich. He then won a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the United States and earned a master's degree in physics at the University of Wisconsin (1967). He then returned to the Technical University, where he completed a doctorate in biophysics (1970). He conducted research in a laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, where he met and became friends with Sakmann, who was also doing his doctoral research there.
Neher and Sakmann began their collaboration in Göttingen in the 1970's, when they first developed their device to track the movements of electrically charged atoms, or ions, in and out of cells. The patch clamp electrode, which was perfected in the early 1980's, proved that ions travel through ion channels that are proteins on the surface of cells, which have a pore in the middle. The ion channels are like doors, which control the flow of electrical activity within and between cells. The Neher-Sakmann patch clamp monitors electrical activity at a single ion channel similarly to the way in which an electrocardiograph records the heart's electrical activity.
A glass tube less than one-thousandth of an inch wide attached to an electronic monitoring device, the patch clamp led to the discovery that cystic fibrosis is a disease of the ion channels. The technique made it possible to tailormake drugs and to achieve an optimal effect on particular ion channels of importance in a given disease.
Since 1983, Neher has been director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, where he is also a professor of neurophysiology.