Abstract
THE Nobel prize for medicine for 1936 is divided between Sir Henry Dale and Prof. Otto Loewi. Sir Henry Dale must have had more influence on medical research than anyone else alive to-day. In the years before the Great War, the Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories, with him as director, were making discoveries such as had never before been made by a laboratory connected with a pharmaceutical firm. More recently, the National Institute for Medical Research has grown under his guidance until it has become the leading centre for medical research in Great Britain, if not in the world. Sir Henry has been largely responsible for the success of the Commission of the League of Nations on Biological Standards, and it is because of him that a large proportion of the International Biological Standard Preparations are kept in Great Britain. He has been secretary of the Royal Society, and a member of the General Medical Council and numerous committees, but his influence has extended over a much wider field than that covered by these public activities. For many years, he has been consulted, with affectionate respect, by people from all over the world, on questions ranging from general policy to experimental detail. Among all these activities, he has found time to make important discoveries in many fields. He has shown an unusual prescience in working out problems which must have seemed trivial at the time, but have since turned out to be fundamental. Prof. O. Loewi's direct influence has covered a narrower field. Working with simple apparatus, for many years now in Graz, he has shown an uncanny genius for paradoxical discoveries which were not at first believed, but were later confirmed and extended by other, and more elaborate, methods, and formed the basis of one of the most interesting fields of scientific advance. His work has touched many problems, and he is one of the best known and most beloved of German-speaking pharmacologists.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
The Nobel Laureates in Medicine. Nature 138, 792 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138792a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138792a0