Published: April 15, 2010
Nanjing University (NJU) held a ceremony on the morning of April 12 to confer an honorary professorship upon Prof. Dr. Erwin Neher, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1991 and Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in G ttingen.
Dr. Neher after the ceremony delivered two lectures to NJU faculty and students on "Biophysical Dissection of Neurotransmitter Release" and "Brain Signals: Communication and Information Processing in the Central Nervous System."
He also visited NJU`s State Key Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, Laboratory of Solid State Microstructure, and new campus at Xianlin.
Dr. Neher and another German scientist Bert Sakmann jointly won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology 1991 for their collaborative work on cell communication mechanism. They developed the patch clamp technique to record the small ionic currents that flow through a single ion channel in neuronal membranes. Their research has helped in the development of new drugs for heart disease, epilepsy, and disorders affecting the nervous and muscle systems.