Nobel Prize Recipient. Otto Loewi, a German-born American physician and pharmacologist, received world-wide recognition after being awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing jointly the award with Sir Henry Dale. The two received the award "for their discoveries relating to chemical transmission of nerve impulses." Since 1927, Loewi had been recognized by the scientific community with 27 nominations for a Nobel candidacy, with one nomination being made by Dale in 1936. At the time of the presentation of the Nobel Prize, he was with the Graz University in Austria. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he was very humble making a point of mentioning others who had helped with the discovery. In 1921 after having a dream about this experiment, he stimulated the heart of a frog with electrical impulses and had the heart pump a small amount of nutrient solution. When the fluid was transferred to another heart, the result was duplicated. This provided proof that chemical substances convey nerve signals to organs. Loewi verified the role of other substances, including acetylcholine, as an endogenous neurotransmitter. Born the son of a wealthy Jewish wine merchant, he attended local schools in Frankfort. He started studying medicine in 1891 at the University of Munich, but transferred to the University of Strasburg. He was stimulated in the anatomy and physiology courses, but started to lose interest in general medicine, missing many of the medical lectures. He did pass his 1893 medical examination, receiving his doctorate in medicine degree in 1896. He became a member of the faculty at the University of Strasburg, while researching at the University of Frankfort. After seeing the numerous deaths at the City Hospital from tuberculous and pneumonia, he left the clinical side of medicine for research for a cure. In 1898 he became an assistant at the University of Marburg, researching metabolism, nutrition and diabetes. In 1900, he was appointed an unpaid lecturer and realized that he had a gift; he became an excellent lecturer. He first met Sir Dale in 1902, while visiting Ernest Starling's laboratory at the University College in London. The two became professional colleagues as well as long-time friends. In 1903, he accepted an appointment at the University of Graz in Austria as a professor of pharmacology. He was the last Jewish professor to be hired by the university until after World War II. He stayed at this facility until Nazi forces began to persecute the Jewish population in Germany before invading Austria. Even though he had become an Austrian citizen, he fled his home in 1938 after being arrested by the Nazi Gestapo at gunpoint with two of his sons. He was release under the conditions that he gave all his possessions, including his research documents and Nobel Prize money, which was in a Swedish bank and had to be transferred to the Nazi Party. Besides doing research on the nervous system, he studied diabetes and the action of the drugs digitalis and epinephrine. He devised Loewi's test for the detection of pancreatic disease. He had published a series of papers about experimental contributions to the physiology and pharmacology of kidney function. Although many of his Jewish friends and colleagues had left Austria for their own safety years earlier, he and his family did not immigrate to the United States until 1940, by the way of Brussels and England. He became a research professor at the New York University in the College of Medicine. In 1946 he became a naturalized American citizen. Besides the Nobel Prize, he received the Cameron Prize from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He received honorary degrees from a host of universities and was a member of numerous scientific societies in the United States and Europe. In 1954, he became a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in London. In 1958 he had a fall and fractured his pelvis. Although he had problems with mobility, he remained alert and lucid until the day he died. After enjoying a lobster and wine dinner the night before, he stopped in mid-sentence during a lively discussion and simply died. After his death, his youngest son bestowed his gold Nobel Prize medal to the Royal Society. The University of Graz received in 1983 the Nobel Prize diploma, which is on display with a copy of the bronze bust of Loewi. The original bust is on display at his summer home, which is now the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In 1903 he married the daughter of a chemistry professor and the couple had three sons and a daughter. His ashes were buried in a plot with his wife with a simple marker with only their names and dates; no mention of his Nobel Prize achievement. In 1973, the centenary of his birth, Austria honored him on a postage stamp. In 1958 he published the book ''A Scientist's Tribute to Art." His "New York Times" obituary gave a glance of him as it read, "The years of Dr Loewi have so overflowed with devotions to art, literature, music, mountain climbing, human fellowship, and science…"