Herbert Spencer Gasser, 1888-1963

Herbert Spencer Gasser studied medicine at the time when physiology was at the front of the medical and biological advance. He became one of the foremost physiologists of his generation and remained so in spite of his wider responsibilities as Director of the Rockefeller Institute. He combined experimental skill with a wide knowledge of scientific principles and a singular charm which gave him many friends. He was born in Plattville, Wisconsin, on 5 July 1888, and went to school there. In his account of himself in the Nobel Prize volume for 1945 he recalls that Plattville had a Normal School of unusual quality. He had a good grounding there in languages and elementary science, and was equally fortunate at the State University where the medical school had just been established with a staff of young and enthusiastic teachers. In the physiology department he worked under Dr Erlanger in an atmosphere of research and there his further interests were determined. He finished his medical course at Johns Hopkins, taking his M.D. in 1915 and working in his spare time with Dr W. H. Howell, the professor of physiology: then, after a year at the University of Wisconsin, he rejoined Dr Erlanger, who had gone to St Louis as head of the Department of Physiology at Washington University. They were both keenly interested in the development of nerve physiology and were soon to begin a collaboration which lasted many years.