Thomas Renton Elliott
Thomas Renton Elliott ( born October 11, 1877 in Willington, County Durham, England; † March 4, 1961 in Broughton, Peeblesshire, Scotland ) was a British physician and physiologist. He was the first one - in 1904 - suspected nerve influenced their downstream cells by release of a chemical substance, in today's terminology of a neurotransmitter. The idea was initially unnoticed. Only after their experimental confirmation, particularly by Henry Hallett Dale and Otto Loewi, which for 1936 were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Elliott was recognized pioneer.
Life
After attending school in Durham Elliott studied from 1896 to 1901 at Trinity College, Cambridge natural sciences, probably with the idea of a later medical studies. After the two-part Tripos examinations in 1900 and 1901 he worked at the Cambridge Institute of Physiology under John Newport Langley. Here those publications created by the autonomic nervous system, which made him famous later. First, however, he encountered indifference to skepticism, especially in Langley. This encouraged him, suspected Dale, who was four years simultaneously to Trinity College, to be in its original plan, a treating physician. To this end, he continued his medical studies at University College Hospital in London, where he became assistant physician in 1910. In World War I he was awarded military honors. In 1918 he married Martha McCosh, with whom he had five children. In these years, the training of physicians in London was reorganized, and 1918 Elliott won the first London Institute of Clinical Medicine. He was instrumental in 1913, founded Medical Research Council operates. In 1939 he retired, but advised further scientific organizations and foundations such as the Wellcome Trust and the Beit Trust, who had supported him even at the beginning of his clinical career.
Work
The discovery of a pharmacologically potent substance in the adrenal glands - the adrenalin - in 1894 had attracted great attention from biologists. The attention rose even when it was noticed that some organs similar to adrenaline was like a stimulation of the sympathetic nerves. Langley was one of the researchers who tested the in detail, and he was the subject of Elliott continued. Its first major essay, 1904 in Volume 31 of the Journal of Physiology, was the transition of the small intestine into the large intestine. There, in humans prevents the ileocecal valve, in cats, dogs and rabbits, however, as Eliott found a ring of muscle at the end of the small intestine passage of intestinal contents backward into the small intestine. The influence of the sympathetic nervous and the adrenalin he found (from the English ): "Electrical stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system causes the ring of muscle contraction, the subsequent muscle of the small and large intestine but to relaxation. Adrenaline ... acts like sympathetic stimulation, ie contraction of the muscle ring and relaxation of the adjacent sections of the intestine. "
Three other publications published in the same issue of the Journal of Physiology. Detaiwed Elliott about bowel movements at an even greater number of animal species: cats, dogs, rabbits, rats, guinea pigs, ferrets and hedgehogs. Again looked sympathetic and adrenaline equal. In a text message, he stated that both the sympathetic and adrenaline brought the urinary bladder of ferrets to contract. The visionary hypothesis is the fourth publication of 1904, again a short message:
"Adrenalin not excite as nicotine sympathetic ganglia. His Agriffspunkt located more peripherally. I think ... that the smooth muscle of the dilator muscle of the pupil itself reacts after complete denervation on adrenaline. Adrenaline so not excite any structure of the sympathetic nerves. Its site of action is ... maybe on the smooth muscle cell, at the contact point with the sympathetic nerves. Task of this active site would be to receive the nervous impulse and transform. Adrenaline could then be chemically stimulant, which is always released when a nerve impulse arrives at the periphery. - Adrenaline might also then be the chemical stimulant liberated on each occasion When the impulse arrives at the periphery. "
The correspondence between adrenaline and the sympathetic nervous system had several researchers observed.
Elliott tries to explain causally: Adrenaline is the the sympathetic nervous system - from the postganglionic sympathetic axons - - released transmitter substance.
In the text message in the Journal of Physiology Elliot has the hypothesis formulated most succinctly.
In his later work he remains unclear, seems to distance himself even so in a 67seitigen essay in the Journal of Physiology in 1905. He ranks up there assumptions about the adrenaline, some in retrospect absurd, about, adrenaline is an antibody against toxic metabolites from the
skeletal muscles;
or it will be stored in the skeletal muscle and is released to maintain the blood pressure in need thereof;
or, finally, " acceptance of all, it is the transmission of sympathetic nerve impulses and is stored for this purpose near the nerve-muscle junctions.
None of these assumptions is definitely refuted by what we know - The evidence does not conclusively disprove any of synthesis
" The specific response to adrenaline distinguishes between, on the one hand, the nerve-muscle contacts of the sympathetic nervous system and, on the other hand, the nerve-muscle contacts of the parasympathetic nervous system, as well as all the synapses of autonomic ganglia, which in fact biochemically the nerve - are related muscle contacts of skeletal muscles. "
The biochemical difference was detected in the course of the thirty years up to 1935 as the difference between nerve cells with noradrenaline as a transmitter on one side and nerve cells with acetylcholine as a transmitter on the other side.
In a recent, 79seitigen essay with experiments from Cambridge, on the innervation of the bladder and urethra, published in 1911, was already an observation during surgery at University College Hospital in London. Subsequent publications did not reach this level. Instead of original research since then was the organization and support of research and teaching Elliotts task.
Recognition
1913 Elliott Fellow of the Royal Society, in 1947 an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College.