Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt

Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt
Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt
Born	1 April 1927 (1927-04) Berlin
Died	23 January 1992 (1992-01-24)
Nationality	German
Fields	Neurologist
Institutions	Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry
Known for	Cortex Physiology

Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt (born 1 April 1927, died 23 January 1992 ) was a German physiologist and neurologist. He is the son of Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt and the younger brother of Werner Creutzfeldt, a professor of internal medicine.

Career

A remarkable career made Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt an renowned researcher ^[1][2]. Otto Creutzfeldt attended the gymnasium (high school) in Kiel. At university he first studied the humanities, but soon switched to medicine, and obtained his M.D. at Freiburg University in Germany in 1953. From 1953 and 1959 he was an assistant and trainee in physiology with Prof. Hoffmann (Freiburg), in psychiatry with Prof. Miiller (Bern), and in neurophysiology and neurology with Prof. Jung (Freiburg). He continuied to work for two years as a research anatomist at UCLA Medical School before moving to the Max-Planck-Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, where he stayed from 1962 to 1971. Creutzfeldt obtained there his degree in clinical neurophysiology (University of Munich). In 1971 he became one of the nine directors of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, as head of the Department of Neurobiology.

Awards

1992 The K-J. Zülch Prize of the Gertrud Reemtsma Foundation awarded posthumously for "Neurophysiology of neuronal correlates of higher behavioral performance, particularly of sight and speech ^[3].

The Otto-Creutzfeldt-Lecture

Creutzfeldt had a profound impact on neuroscience in particular in Germany for he had an unusually large number of pupils who held chairs in German universities, Max-Planck-Institutes and, Leibniz Institutes. From 1992 a lecture is given yearly, and from 1999 biennial, by distinguished scientists to his honour at the University of Göttingen during the Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society ("The Otto-Creutzfeldt-Lecture")^[4].

1992 Bert Sakmann, Recordings of excitatory and inhibitory currents from visual cortex neurons: An effort lasting 25 years

1993 Heinz Wässle, Vision in darkness: The rod circuit of the mammalian retina

1994 Wolf Singer, The putative role of response synchronization in neocortical processing

1995 Henning Scheich, Auditory cortex: pattern analyzer and interpreter

1996 Klaus-Peter Hoffmann, Evolution of motion perception and slow eye movement control in mammals

1997 Semir Zeki, The conscious vision of the blind and the modularity of consciousness

1998 Terry Sejnowski, Computational neurobiology of sleep, and by Eric Kandel, Genes, synapses and long-term memory

1999 Gerhard Neuweiler, Hearing in echolocating bats, a paradigm for mammalian audition?

2003 Eckart O. Altenmüller, From Laetoli to Carnegie: musician's brains and neuroplasticity

2005

2007 Uwe Heinemann, Cellular mechanisms of memory consolidation in the hippocampal formation

2009 Atsushi Iriki, Neuroscience of Primate Intellectual Evolution

2011 Jan Born, The memory function of sleep (announced)

Bibliography

Creutzfeldt O.D. (1983) Cortex cerebri. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York

References

1. ^ Reichardt, W. and Henn, V. (1992) Otto D. Creutzfeldt 1927–1992 Biological Cybernetics, 67, 385-386 [1]
2. ^ Singer, W. (1992) Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt, 1927–1992 Experimental Brain Research 88, 463-465 [2]
3. ^ Winners of the Zülch Prize" [3]
4. ^ Geschichte und Konzept der Göttinger Neurobiologentagung 1973 - 2003 von Prof. Dr. Norbert Elsner http://www.neuro.uni-goettingen.de/nbc.php?sel=history

Persondata
Name	Creutzfeldt, Otto Detlev
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1 April 1927
Place of birth	Berlin
Date of death	23 January 1992
Place of death