Prof. Jonathan Magnes (1912 – 1980)
Prof. Magnes
Prof. Magnes was born in 1912 in New York and immigrated to Palestine in 1922. As a Ph.D. candidate, Prof. Magnes started his academic career studying the functional metabolism of glucose in the brain using a unique brain perfusion technique under the supervision of Prof. Alexander Geiger. Employing this technique, he continued his work as a principal investigator and published numerous papers on the metabolism of glucose and amino acids in the brain under different physiological conditions.
His scientific achievements made him an internationally renowned scientist in his field. He served on UNESCO’s international advisory committee on arid zones research and on the neurochemistry panel of the International Brain Research Society. He was also a member of the World Federation of Neurology.
In addition to his research achievements, Prof. Magnes founded the Department of Physiology at the Hebrew University – Hadassa Medical School and also served as the Dean of the faculty of Medicine. In 1962 he founded the Israel Society for Physiology and Pharmacology and served as its first president.
Prof. Magnes was well-known not only for his scientific achievements but also for his special personality, being a noble and modest person. Following his death in 1980, his family and the Department of Physiology members of at the Hebrew University have established a fund to commemorate his memory by scientific lectures given by outstanding scientists at the annual meetings of the Israel Society of Physiology and Pharmacology.
Magnes Lecturers and ISPP Plenary Speakers
| Lecturer | Institute | Year |
| Annette Dolphin | Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology, University College London, England | 2019 |
| Arthur Konnert | Institute of Neuroscience, Technische Universitat München, Germany | 2016 |
| Dario DiFrancesco | Department of Biosciences, University of Milan, Italy | 2015 |
| Peter Agre | Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA | 2014 |
| Clifford Woolf | Neurobiology Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, USA | 2013 |
| Bruce Bean | Harvard Brain Science Institute, Cambridge, MA, USA | 2011 |
| Ehud Isacoff | University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA | 2010 |
| Michel Lazdunski | Institut Universitaire de France, and Prof. of Pharmacology, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, France | 2008 |
| Irwin Levitan | Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, USA | 2007 |
| Hermann Steller | Strang Laboratory of Cancer Research, Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA | 2006 |
| David Julius | Dept. of Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology, Univ. of California, San Francisco, USA | 2006 |
| Michel Revel | Dept. of Molecular genetics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel | 2005 |
| Peter Jenner | Dept of Biomedical Sciences, King’s College London, University of London, England | 2004 |
| Denis Noble | University Laboratory of Physiology, Medical Sciences Division, University of Oxford, England | 2003 |
| Marta Weinstock-Rosin | Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel | 1999 |
| William J. Betz | Dept. of Physiology & Biophysics, Univ. of Colorado, School of Medicine, Denver, CO, USA | 1998 |
| Geoffrey Burnstock | Director of Autonomic Neuroscience Inst. Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London, UK | 1998 |
| King-Wai Yau | Dept. of Neuroscience, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, MD, USA | 1996 |
| Richard Tsein | Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, Stanford University, CA, USA | 1993 |
| Denis A. Baylor | Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University, CA, USA | 1990 |
| Chris Miller | Dept. of Biochemistry, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, U.S.A. | 1990 |
| Harald Reuter | Pharmakologisches Institut, Universitat Bern, Switzerland | 1988 |
| Torsten Wiesel | Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA | 1988 |
| Charles Gilbert | Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA | 1988 |
| Bert Sackmann | Max Planck Institute, Gottingen, Germany | 1982 |