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Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt (April 1, 1927 in Berlin, Germany – January 23, 1992 in Goettingen, Germany) was a German neurologist and neuroscientist.

Biography

Otto Creutzfeldt was born on April 1, 1927, in Berlin, as the son of the neurologist Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt, whose name has become associated with the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In 1945, Otto Creutzfeldt studied theology, history and philosophy at the universities of Kiel and Tuebingen, but in 1948 he decided to switch to medicine, which he studied at the universities of Kiel, Heidelberg, and finally Freiburg, where he obtained his MD in 1953. In the following years, as a student of Prof. Richard Jung, Creutzfeldt began his research on the single-unit recording technique - at that time still a daring and highly sophisticated endeavor - which he applied the cerebral cortex. Otto Creutzfeldt studied neuronal activity during epileptic seizures, described changes in firing patterns associated with changes in arousal, and investigated responses in somatosensory and visual cortex to sensory stimulation. He was one of the first to point out that inhibition plays an important role in sculpting the response properties of neurons in the central nervous system. From 1960-1962, Creutzfeldt worked as a research anatomist at UCLA Medical School before moving to the Max-Planck-Institute for Psychiatry in Munich where he was to stay for nearly 10 years from 1962 to 1971. In 1968 he became head of the Department of Neurophysiology at the MPI for Psychiatry in Munich. Creutzfeldt became one of the pioneers of intracellular recordings from neurons in the central nervous system, studying the relation between postsynaptic potentials in cortical neurons and EEG activity, on synaptic interactions between specific and non-specific thalamic inputs in the motor and the visual cortex, on synaptic transmission in the lateral geniculate nucleus and visual cortex, and on the role of postsynaptic inhibition in the formation of visual receptive fields. Creutzfeldt always felt that basic and clinical neuroscience should go hand in hand: he studied the clinical applicability of EEG patterns and founded the grounds for the development of algorithms to locate the dipoles responsible for evoked potentials. Among his students and collaborators were the now well-known neuroscientists Wolf Singer, Bert Sakmann, Henning Scheich, Heinz Waessle and many others.

In 1971, now 44 years old, Creutzfeldt accepted Manfred Eigen's call to Goettingen to become the director of the department of Neurobiology in the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. It was in this department that B. Sakmann and E. Neher performed the experiments in the early 1980s which were honoured with the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1991. A sabbatical in Seattle, WA, enabled Creutzfeldt a close collaboration with the neurosurgeon George Ojemann, where he was able to record from neurons in the cerebral cortex of humans and to establish direct relationships between cellular responses and cognitive behavior.

Creutzfeldt's publication list comprises more than 200 experimental reports and more than 20 major philosophical contributions on the mind-matter problem and the ethical implications of the neurosciences, as well as several books including his famous monograph on the "Cortex Cerebri".

Otto Creutzfeldt understood his scientific efforts as an integral part of his life. His priorities were therefore the same for both domains. He was driven by genuine curiosity and strove for harmony, esthetic solutions and synthesis. He had a fine mastery of the flute, and one of his greatest pleasures was to join his friends, and in the last few years also his children, to play chamber music, preferably by composers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods.