Loeb, Richard

(1905–36) and Leopold, Nathan Freuenthal (b. 1904)

   US murderers. Loeb and Leopold were university graduates from wealthy Jewish families in the United States, who abducted and killed a fourteen-year-old boy in 1924. Their motives were a desire to satisfy their lust for thrills and the wish to commit the perfect crime. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment plus ninety-nine years after a sensational trial. Loeb was murdered in gaol. Leopold, who had with Loeb run a successful correspondence course for prisoners in many parts of the country, taught himself more than twenty languages in prison. He was paroled in 1958. LOEWI, Otto 1873–1961. German biochemist and Nobel laureate, 1936. After working at the University of Vienna, Loewi held a professorship at the University of Graz. His major work was to demonstrate that chemical as well as electrical phenomena were involved in nerve action. He discovered that a fluid was released when the nerves were stimulated. Loewi shared the 1936 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for this discovery. After the Nazi invasion of Austria, Loewi was imprisoned but bought his freedom and left for Oxford. In 1940 he emigrated to the United States, where he joined the faculty of the New York University College of Medicine.