Bert Sakmann

Bert Sakmann is a German cell physiologist who shared the 1991 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Erwin Neher for their work on the function of single ion channels in cells and the invention of the patch clamp. He was born in Stuttgart on 12 June 1942 and studied medicine at Tübingen, Freiburg, Berlin, Paris and Munich. He worked as a scientific assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich under Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt, spent time at University College London in the biophysics department under Bernard Katz, and completed a medical dissertation at Göttingen in 1974 on neural light adaptation in the cat retina. He then returned to Creutzfeldt's laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, where he joined the membrane biology group in 1979 and worked with Neher. He later became a professor at Heidelberg University and an emeritus scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research. His honors include the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 1986, the Leibniz Prize in 1987 and election as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1994.