After Nick Sinclair · CC BY-SA 3.0

Bernard Katz worked out how signals cross the gap between nerve and muscle, showing that neurotransmitter is released not as a smooth trickle but in discrete packets — a finding that became foundational to modern neuroscience. He shared the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Julius Axelrod and Ulf von Euler for the work, conducted largely in Britain after he fled Nazi Germany as a young man; he was knighted in 1969.