Herbert Spencer Gasser
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Herbert Spencer Gasser
Born: 5 July 1888, Platteville, WI, USA
Died: 11 May 1963, New York, NY, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York, NY, USA
Prize motivation: "for their discoveries relating to the highly differentiated functions of single nerve fibres."
Prize share: 1/2
Work
Our bodily functions are governed by our nervous system, which consists of many nerve cells with extensions, or nerve fibers, that form a system of connections between the brain and spinal cord and the rest of the body. Signals in the nervous system are conveyed by weak electrical currents and by chemical substances. During the 1920s Herbert Gasser and Joseph Erlanger studied the properties and distribution of nerve fibers. They divided nerve fibers into two different types with different thicknesses and showed that the thicker fibers convey nerve impulses faster.
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