Otto Loewi

Otto Loewi was born in Germany on 3 June 1873 and trained as a pharmacologist. In 1902, working in Ernest Starling's lab at University College London, he met Henry Dale, who became a lifelong friend. The friendship seeded the work that would define him: Loewi discovered acetylcholine as an endogenous neurotransmitter, showing that the nervous system operates through chemical messengers. For that insight he shared the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Dale, who had helped inspire the experiment. He died on 25 December 1961.