Emil du Bois-Reymond (nonfiction)

Emil du Bois-Reymond.

Emil du Bois-Reymond (7 November 1818 – 26 December 1896) was a German physician and physiologist, the discoverer of nerve action potential, and the developer of experimental electrophysiology.

He studied medicine with such zeal and success as to attract the notice of Johannes Peter Müller (1801–1858), a well-known professor of anatomy and physiology.

During 1840 Müller made du Bois-Reymond his assistant for physiology, and as the beginning for an inquiry gave him a copy of the essay which Carlo Matteucci had just published on the electric phenomena of animals. This determined the work of du Bois-Reymond's life. He chose as the subject of his graduation thesis "Electric fishes," and so commenced a long series of investigations on bioelectricity. The results of these inquiries were made known partly in papers communicated to scientific journals, but also and chiefly by his work Investigations of Animal Electricity, the first part of which was published during 1848, the last during 1884.

Du Bois-Reymond developed the idea that a living tissue, such as muscle, might be regarded as composed of a number of "electric molecules," and that the electric behavior of the muscle was the outcome of the behavior of these native electric molecules. We now know that these are sodium, potassium and other ions, the gradients of which are responsible for maintaining membrane potentials in excitable cells.

His theory was soon criticized by several contemporary physiologists, such as Ludimar Hermann, who maintained that a living untouched tissue, such as a muscle, is not the subject of electric currents so long as it is at rest, it is isoelectric in substance, and therefore need not be supposed to be composed of electric molecules, all the electric phenomena which it manifests being due to internal molecular changes associated with activity or injury.

Du Bois-Reymond's theory was of great value if only as a working hypothesis, and that as such it greatly helped in the advance of science. Thus, du Bois-Reymond's work concerned mainly animal electricity, yet he made other physiological inquiries — such as could be studied by physical methods —- especially concerning the phenomena of diffusion, though he published little or nothing concerning his results.

He was the brother of mathematician Paul du Bois-Reymond.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Carlo Matteucci (nonfiction)
• Electricity (nonfiction)
• Johannes Peter Müller (nonfiction)
• Ludimar Hermann (nonfiction)
• Paul du Bois-Reymond (nonfiction), brother

External links:

• Emil du Bois-Reymond @ Wikipedia