First Patch Clamp, circa 1974

In the 1950s, scientists began to suspect that single-ion channels existed, but it took them another quarter century to verify it. In 1974, physicist Erwin Neher and cell physiologist Bert Sakmann at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany (click here for a related feature), invented the "patch clamp," the first device to measure the flow of electrical current through single-ion channels, confirming their existence.

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