The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In Graz, Austria, another neurophysiologist, Otto Loewi, also converged on the idea of chemical neurotransmitters.16 The night before Easter Sunday, 1920—in the brief lull of peace between the wars—he dreamed of an experiment. He remembered very little of the dream, but perhaps it involved a muscle and a nerve in a frog. “I awoke” he wrote, “turned on the light and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of thin paper.17 Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at 6.00 o’clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl. The next night, at 3.00 o’clock, the idea returned. It was the design of an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission that I had uttered seventeen years ago was correct. I got up immediately, went to the laboratory, and performed a simple experiment on a frog heart according to the nocturnal design.”