Word: nachmansohn
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Identifying and relating the chemicals involved in this process has been Dr. Nachmansohn's life work. Four years ago, while studying cholinesterase, he stumbled on a chemical, nicknamed PAM, which proved an effective antidote to deadly nerve gases. Now his explanation of how nerves work offers insight into yet another obscure matter: how nerves are deadened by anesthesia. The discovery that such anesthetics as procaine and the Indian poison curare combine easily with the receptor protein, blocking the biochemical reaction, could lead to better anesthetics and more efficient drugs for treating disorders of the human nervous system...
...chemical reaction at the synapses (the junctions between nerves) causes the impulses to flow through the nerves until-through junction after junction-they reach the muscles. But the chemistry of impulse transmission along the nerve fibers was not known. Last week Colum bia University announced that Dr. David Nachmansohn and his colleagues in the university's Department of Neurology had found new evidence to support his 20-year-old theory of the biochemical reaction that lets a nerve carry a current, then shut...
Like many another medical victory, the development of PAM (2-pyridine al-doxime methiodide) was the unplanned result of basic research. First, Columbia's Dr. David Nachmansohn showed that the enzyme cholinesterase (one of the body's catalysts) is essential for the transmission of nerve impulses. Trying to learn more about cholinesterase, Biochemist Irwin B. Wilson discovered that nerve gases (and certain insecticides) cause death by adding to the nerve cell's cholinesterase something that damages it. The something is a phosphoryl that destroys the nerves' ability to transmit impulses to muscles...
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