Dr Werner P Koella, 1917-2008

Abstract

Dr Werner P Koella, aged 91 years, passed away on 13 January 2008. After graduating from the University of Zurich in 1942, he started his career at the Clinic of Neurosurgery of the Zurich University Hospital. After 2 years of clinical activity, his interest in the functioning of the central nervous system led him to join the Institute of Physiology. Under the guidance of Professor WR Hess, Nobel laureate in medicine and physiology, he first directed his research efforts toward the experimental study of nystagmus and the role of the hypothalamus in fluid excretion. He made use of the technique of electrical brain stimulation in the unanesthetized cat and reported in 1952 together with K Akert and R Hess Jr on the sleep-inducing action of thalamic stimuli. In the following year, the same authors published the paper ‘Cortical and subcortical recordings in natural and artificially induced sleep in cats,’ which has been highly cited and marks the beginning of Koella's career in experimental sleep research. In 1951, he moved to the Department of Physiology of the University of Minnesota, where he joined the neurophysiology laboratory of Ernst Gellhorn. There he studied the effects of ambient temperature on the EEG and began to use the method of evoked responses to monitor central nervous structures. From Minneapolis he moved to Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, where he joined Peter J Morgane at the Worcester Foundation of Experimental Biology. From very early on, Werner Koella recognized the important role of serotonin in brain mechanisms. Already in 1959, he published the first papers on the effects of serotonin and LSD on evoked potentials. In the following years, serotonin became the major focus of his research, culminating in his most highly cited paper on the effect of serotonin depletion by parachlorophenylalanine on sleep, which he published in 1968 with Feldstein and Czicman. Because at that time serotonin was considered to be the major sleep-promoting transmitter, he suggested jocularly that its name be changed to somnotonin.