Herbert Spencer Gasser

Herbert Spencer Gasser was an American physiologist, born on 5 July 1888 in Platteville, Wisconsin, who died in New York on 11 May 1963. When he received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, a half share, he worked at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. The prize, shared with Joseph Erlanger, recognized discoveries relating to the highly differentiated functions of single nerve fibres. The nervous system is made of many nerve cells with extensions, called nerve fibers, that connect the brain and spinal cord with the rest of the body, and signals travel along them as weak electrical currents together with chemical substances. During the 1920s Gasser and Erlanger studied the properties and distribution of nerve fibers, divided them into two types of different thickness, and showed that the thicker fibers conduct nerve impulses faster.