Detlev Wulf Bronk

Born Aug. 13, 1897, in New York. American physiologist; member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA (1945), foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1958). Bronk graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1921 and was professor there from 1929 to 1949. He was president of Johns Hopkins University from 1949 to 1953, and in 1953 he became president of Rockefeller University. Bronk’s major work has been on the electrophysiology of the nervous system and on the mechanism of synaptic transmission of stimuli. Under his direction a number of biophysical methods were developed for the simultaneous investigation of tissue metabolism and electrical activity of the cerebral cortex as well as of sympathetic ganglia and other elements of the central nervous system.