Reply to the Letter of Otto Hutter 'The vagus and the heart: Revisiting an early contribution to a still on-going dispute'

摘要

I enjoyed reading Otto Hutter's letter related to my Perspectives article (Janig, 2011) for two reasons. (1) The comments of Otto Hutter show that we are discussing pieces of experimental neurobiological science that are lively and rather open, based on recent and old experimental measurements. Here the mechanisms underlying the neuro-effector transmission from postganglionic parasympathetic cardiomotor axons to cells of the sinoatrial node (SAN) are addressed. This is an obviously never-ending story that goes back to Otto Loewi (Loewi, 1921) and Sir Henry Dale. (2) More personally, but certainly related to the first point, Otto Hutter worked in the fifties of the last century together with Wolfgang Trautwein in Baltimore at the Wilmer Institute, Johns Hopkins Hospital. Stephen Kuffler brought both of them together. Wolfgang Trautwein was my first chairman in physiology in Heidelberg between 1966 and 1971. I had a high opinion of him as a human and scientist and 'Hutter & Trautwein' was for us younger developing scientists something rather special and exemplary.