Henry Hallett Dale

Sir Henry Hallett Dale was an English pharmacologist and physiologist, born in Islington, London, on 9 June 1875, the third of seven children of a pottery manufacturer and his wife. He was educated at Tollington Park College and The Leys School, Cambridge, and in 1894 entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he worked under the physiologist John Langley; he also studied briefly under Paul Ehrlich in Frankfurt in 1903 and received his Doctor of Medicine from Cambridge in 1909. In 1914 he became director of the Department of Biochemistry and Pharmacology at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, and in that year he and his colleagues first identified acetylcholine as a possible neurotransmitter. For his study of acetylcholine as an agent in the chemical transmission of nerve pulses he shared the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Otto Loewi. He originated the scheme for classifying neurons by the neurotransmitter they release, known as Dale principle, whose reading that each neuron releases only one transmitter was later shown to be false. He chaired the Wellcome Trust from 1938 to 1960 and died on 23 July 1968.