3. Biophysics at University College

Although Bernard Katz’s impact on the course of neuroscience was as at least as great as Kuffler’s, the style of the two men was very different, and their influence was felt in different ways. Whereas Kuffler’s modus operandi was quintessentially eclectic—he would work on a project with a collaborator or two for a few years and then move on to an entirely different problem—Katz was a scientific bulldog. He had seized on the fundamental problem of chemical synaptic transmission in the late 1940s and never let it go. And whereas Kuffler was, superficially at least, an extroverted democrat, Katz was reserved and, to some degree, an autocrat.

As a result of these personal contrasts, as well as the cultural distinctions between the way science was practiced then in the United States and the United Kingdom, Katz’s Department of Biophysics at University College London was very different from the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard. Although World War II had ended 25 years before I arrived in 1971, the mentality of rationing and general tight-fistedness remained. The labs were on the upper floors of one of the old buildings on Gower Street that ran the length of a long London block and housed most of the basic science departments. The rooms of the five faculty members in the department were comfortable but modest, and the surfeit of furnishings, equipment, and supplies that I had....