Emil du Bois-Reymond

Emil du Bois-Reymond was a German physiologist born in Berlin in 1818 who founded experimental electrophysiology and co-discovered the nerve action potential. A student and assistant of Johannes Peter Müller, he was handed Carlo Matteucci's essay on animal electricity in 1840 and spent the next decades on bioelectricity, publishing his Investigations of Animal Electricity between 1848 and 1884. He proposed that living muscle behaves as an array of electric molecules, a view later reworked by his student Julius Bernstein into an ionic model of the action potential. He held the chair of physiology at the University of Berlin from 1858 until his death in 1896 and became perpetual secretary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He was also a prominent public lecturer, an early German convert to Darwinism, and the author of the Ignorabimus speech on the limits of science.