Remembering GABA Pioneer Edward Kravitz | The Transmitter

Edward Kravitz, who died in September, was a former MBL trustee, investigator, Neurobiology course co-director and founding faculty member in the Summer Program in Neuroscience, Excellence and Success (SPINES). His MBL obituary is here.

In 1961, Edward Kravitz set out to clear up a long-standing debate about gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) once and for all.

Kravitz, a biochemist, had just joined Harvard Medical School as instructor in pharmacology. He and his colleagues suspected GABA was a neurotransmitter, an idea at odds with the then-prevailing view that neuronal communication was largely electrical; even those who conceded the existence of chemical messengers recognized only two small molecules, acetylcholine and norepinephrine, as bona fide neurotransmitters.

Kravitz’s GABA team, as he called his colleagues, painstakingly dissected the muscle and nerves of a lobster, the lab’s animal model, and then stimulated the excitatory and inhibitory connections to see if GABA would be released, recalls Zach Hall, a now-retired neuroscientist who was the first graduate student in Kravitz’s lab.

Hall had graduated and was on his way to California when he says he got word from Kravitz: Their experiment had worked. Read rest of the article here.

Source: Remembering GABA pioneer Edward Kravitz | The Transmitter