Nobel Understanding

Science has long recognized the role of nerve fibers in carrying messages from the brain to the muscles and organs of the body. But only recently has it begun to understand the complex mechanisms by which these messages are transmitted. Last week Stockholm's Royal Caroline Institute honored the work of three scientists whose research has laid the groundwork for that understanding. It awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine to Professor Ulf von Euler of Sweden, Sir Bernard Katz of Great Britain and Dr. Julius Axelrod of the U.S.

The three, who will share about $80,000 in prize money, have been working independently of each other. But their findings, which the Caroline Institute says have "greatly stimulated the search for remedies against nervous and mental disturbance," are complementary. Sir Bernard, head of the department of biophysics at London's University College, has discovered that a transmitter chemical called acetylcholine is released at nerve-muscle junctions. Von Euler, a Caroline Institute staff member whose father won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1929, has found that a chemical called noradrenaline is stored in small granules within the nerve fibers and serves as a transmitter at nerve terminals. Dr. Axelrod, chief of pharmacology of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., has identified the mechanisms that regulate the formation of noradrenaline in the nerve cells as well as the mechanisms involved in its inactivation--partly under the influence of an enzyme that he discovered.

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