Erwin Neher

Erwin Neher ( born March 20, 1944 in Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria ) is a German biophysicist. He was awarded in 1991 cells, together with Bert Sakmann, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the groundbreaking discoveries about the function of single ion channels. Both scientists played a leading role in the development of the patch -clamp technique, which formed the basis for their discoveries. Neher is since 1983 director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and Head of the Department of Membrane Biophysics.

Life

Neher is the son of Franz Xaver Neher, an employee of a company for milk products, and Elizabeth Neher (born Pfeiffer), a certified teacher. He has two older sisters. Erwin Neher attended the gymnasium of the Marist Brothers in Mindelheim. There, mathematics and physics were his favorite subjects. He spent his youth in Buchloe. In his spare time he was interested in the recently published literature on cybernetics. He studied physics in 1963 at the Technical University Munich and from 1966 with the help of a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Wisconsin.

At the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, he received his doctorate in 1970 with Hans Dieter Lux ( 1924-1994 ), in whose laboratory he also got to know Bert Sakmann. From 1976, Neher and Sakmann were together at the University of Göttingen Young Investigator Laboratory, where they worked together with other researchers.

Neher is married since 1978 with Eva -Maria Neher, with whom he had five children.

Awards and honors

In addition to the Nobel Prize he received numerous other awards, including an honorary professorship in Göttingen and ten honorary doctorates on four different continents, as well as the 1986 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, 1987 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1989 a Gairdner Foundation International Award, 1991 with the Ralph W. Gerard prize - 1990 and the Lower Saxony State prize for Science. Since 1998 he is member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, since 2008 National Academy of Sciences. Erwin Neher is also an honorary citizen of his home town of Buchloe.