Bert Sakmann (; born 12 June 1942) is a German cell physiologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Erwin Neher in 1991 for their work on "the function of single ion channels in cells," and the invention of the patch clamp. Bert Sakmann was Professor at Heidelberg University and is an Emeritus Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. Since 2008 he leads an emeritus research group at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology.
Life and career
Sakmann was born in Stuttgart, the son of Annemarie (née Schaefer), a physical therapist, and Bertold Sakmann, a theater director. Sakmann enrolled in Volksschule in Lindau, and completed the Wagenburg gymnasium in Stuttgart in 1961. He studied medicine from 1967 onwards in Tübingen, Freiburg, Berlin, Paris and Munich. After completing his medical exams at LMU Munich, he became a medical assistant in 1968 at LMU Munich, while also working as a scientific assistant (Wissenschaftlicher Assistent) at Munich's Max-Planck-Institut für Psychiatrie, in the Neurophysiology Department under Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt. In 1971, he moved to University College London, where he worked in the Department of Biophysics under Bernard Katz. In 1974, he completed his medical dissertation, under the title Elektrophysiologie der neuralen Helladaptation in der Katzenretina (Electrophysiology of Neural Light Adaption in the Cat Retina) in the Medical Faculty of Göttingen University. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1994.