Otto Creutzfeldt was born in Berlin where he also attended high school (the "gymnasium"). At university he first studied the humanities, but soon switched to medicine, and obtained his M.D. at Freiburg University in Germany in 1953. He pursued a clinical training in neurology in Freiburg and spent a year as resident in psychiatry in Bern. At the Department of Neurology in Freiburg, out of the remnants of what was left after the war, Richard Jung had built a clinic where basic research and patient care were integral parts. Jung created a unique intellectual atmosphere, where Otto Creutzfeldt, Giinter Baumgartner, Rudolph von Baumgarten, Otto-Joachim Griisser, Hans Kornhuber, and later a whole new generation of neurologists and physiologists obtained their training and, more importantly, received intellectual stimulation which determined their life-long scientific careers in neurobiology.
Otto Creutzfeldt's first publications were concerned with the pathophysiology of cortical events during epileptic seizures, and the physiology and classification of neuronal activity in the visual cortex in response to visual stimuli. In 1960 he spent two postdoctoral years at the Brain Research Institute of the University of California at Los Angeles, and in 1962 he joined the Max-Planck-Institut fiir Psychiatry in M/inchen. In 1971 he became director of the Department of Neurobiology at the newly built Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Grttingen. Despite an ever-increasing load of work he loved to do experiments. This is reflected in the very original approach to the many varied themes of his research, as experiments never became routine for him. Since he was an expert in techniques ranging from intracellular recordings to patient examination and had sound clinical judgment, he was only limited by the then available techniques and had the freedom to choose the approach most suitable. Some of the questions he pursued were the relationship between single cell activity and psychophysical phenomena, especially in the visual system; the relationship between surface EEG and the pathophysiology of cortical cell discharges; the relationship between evoked potentials and local neuronal electrical activity; and the contribution of specific and non-specific afferents to central information processing. It was in these years that Bert Sakmann, Henning Scheich, Wolf Singer, Heinz W/issle, to name a few, started to work in his laboratory as doctoral students, besides an impressive list of researchers who chose to come to M/inchen or later to Grttingen to spend their sabbaticals. Otto Creutzfeldt never stopped to