Brain Matters the Podcast

Historical and current perspective on tobacco use and nicotine addiction

When Dr. John Dani came to talk with us about nicotine addiction, he mentioned a letter Nobel Prize winner Sir Henry Dale wrote to a colleague. In a review Dani wrote on the history of nicotine addiction, he referenced the letter:

The excitement, energy and progress seem unique to our time, but our impressions were expressed well by Henry Dale more than 50 years ago. Dale, who identified ACh, when in his eighties, wrote to his friend Thomas R. Elliott, who also had made seminal contributions toward understanding synaptic transmission. An excerpt from Dale’s 1958 letter expresses the dizzying rate of scientific advances he observed when visiting Bernard Katz’s lab while Katz was in his astonishing prime:

‘I feel almost bewildered by the kind of detail which such people are now elucidating with the aid of electron-ultramicroscopy, and also with an electrical recording which they can now achieve of the transmitted excitatory process at the motor end-plate of a single muscle fibre…I find it really exciting to think of the contrast between physiology as we had it from Langley and Gaskell, and what it is becoming today. A great deal indeed has happened since you first suggested a chemical mechanism for the transmission of the excitatory process from a nerve ending; and it goes on happening with a constant acceleration.’ (Letter from Dale to Elliott, 29 June 1958, Royal Society Archives, quoted by Tansey).

Read the full article here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166223611000725#

John A. Dani, David J.K. Balfour, Historical and current perspective on tobacco use and nicotine addiction, Trends in Neurosciences, Volume 34, Issue 7, July 2011, Pages 383-392.