Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt

Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt (1 April 1927 – 23 January 1992) was a German physiologist and neurologist.

He was the son of Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt and the younger brother of Werner Creutzfeldt, a professor of internal medicine.

A remarkable career made Creutzfeldt a renowned

researcher.

Creutzfeldt attended the gymnasium (high school) in Kiel.

At university

he first studied the humanities, but soon switched to medicine, and obtained his M.D. at Freiburg University in Germany in 1953.

From 1953 and 1959 he was an assistant and trainee in physiology with Prof. Hoffmann (Freiburg), in psychiatry with Prof. Miiller (Bern), and in neurophysiology and neurology with Prof. Jung

(Freiburg).

He continued to work for two years as a research

anatomist at UCLA Medical School before moving to the

Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, where he stayed from

1962 to 1971.

Creutzfeldt obtained there his degree in clinical

neurophysiology (University of Munich).

In 1971 he became one of the

nine directors of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, as head of the Department

of Neurobiology.

Creutzfeldt O.D. (1983) Cortex cerebri.

Springer, Berlin

Heidelberg New York

1992 The K-J.

Zülch Prize of the Gertrud Reemtsma Foundation awarded posthumously for "Neurophysiology of neuronal correlates of higher behavioral performance, particularly of sight and speech.

Creutzfeldt had a profound impact on neuroscience, in particular in Germany, for he had an unusually

large number of pupils who held chairs in German universities, Max Planck Institutes

and, Leibniz Institutes.

From 1992 a lecture is given yearly, and from 1999 biennial, by distinguished scientists to his honour at the University of Göttingen during the Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society ("The Otto-Creutzfeldt-Lecture").