Joseph Erlanger

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Joseph Erlanger (January 5, 1874 – December 5, 1965) was an American scientist who helped start modern neuroscience. With his student Herbert Spencer Gasser, he showed that different nerve fibers transmit signals at different speeds, and that the speed depends on the fiber’s diameter. They shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1944 for these discoveries.

Early life and education
He was born in San Francisco to a Jewish family whose parents came from Württemberg, Germany. He was the sixth of seven children. He earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1895, and a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1899, finishing near the top of his class. He trained at Johns Hopkins Hospital and worked in a physiology lab, where he also lectured on digestion and metabolism.

Career beginnings
Erlanger had an interest in cardiology and studied how electrical impulses move through the heart, working with Arthur Hirschfelder. He also developed and patented a new type of blood pressure cuff to measure pressure from the brachial artery.

Academic positions
In 1906 he became the first chair of physiology at the University of Wisconsin. In 1910 he moved to Washington University in St. Louis, where he could fund more of his research. His former student Gasser joined him there, and they continued collaborative work.

Important work
During World War I they studied the effects of shock. In 1922 they demonstrated how nerve signals could be amplified and recorded with a modified measuring device. They showed that neurons vary in how easily they can be excited and that the speed of nerve signals increases with the diameter of the nerve fiber. They also discovered that action potentials occur in two phases: a sharp spike followed by a slower after-spike. The partnership ended in 1931 when Gasser moved to Cornell University.

Later life and legacy
Erlanger died of heart disease in St. Louis in 1965. The Erlanger House in St. Louis is a National Historic Landmark. A lunar crater was named in his honor in 2009.