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Prof Otto Hutter came to the UK via the Kindertransport
We record with deep regret the death of Otto Hutter, Emeritus Regius Professor of Physiology at Glasgow University, at his home in Bournemouth. Born in 1924 in Vienna, he was 96.
Growing up in a Jewish family, Otto enjoyed a happy childhood in Vienna. His family lived on the Lilienbrunngasse, a street in the Leopoldstadt area, very near the Danube with the city centre beyond. Normal life was shattered after March 1938 by the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria. However, aged just 14, Otto was to become one of the very last children with no personal connections in the UK permitted to escape Vienna through the Kindertransport. He was number 359 of 360 children put on the train to reach Britain: he kept the numbered ticket all his life. Within just a few years, some 493 Jewish men, women and children from just this one street were to die in the Holocaust, including nearly all Otto’s family.
Last modified on Thu 10 Dec 2020 14.41 EST
In 1955 the physiologist Otto Hutter, who has died aged 96, was studying the pacemaker cells to be found in the heart. These produce the electrical impulses that fire the muscle’s contractions. At the time it was not clear why these electrical impulses should fluctuate, but in a set of extraordinary photographs Hutter and his colleague Wolfgang Trautwein captured the trace from the pacemaker cells showing what happened when different nerves in the body were stimulated.
The photographs, which became a standard feature in medical textbooks, showed that when the vagus nerve, running from the brain stem to the colon, was stimulated, the waves of electrical activity in the pacemaker cells died down, and when the sympathetic nerves, responding to stress, were activated, they increased.