Edward Arthur Kravitz (born December 19, 1932) is an American neuroscientist who is the George Packer Berry Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School.
After graduating from Evander Childs High School in The Bronx, Kravitz remained in the neighborhood he grew up in and began his studies at City College of New York (CCNY).
Under the supervision of George Tarnowski, Lou Kaplan, a young biochemist at the time, and Christine Riley, director of the chemotherapy unit, Kravitz began an independent research project studying amino acid metabolism in ascites tumor cells.
He met a lot of great colleagues at this time, including Marshall Nirenberg with whom he shared an apartment on Huron Avenue in Ann Arbor.
Although at one time Kravitz planned on pursuing two additional post-doctoral positions after studying morphine metabolism in the Stadtman laboratory, he was recruited to Harvard Medical School by Steve Kuffler in 1960.
Almost immediately, he began working with Steve Kuffler, Dave Potter and Nico van Gelder on the experiments that would eventually demonstrate that GABA functions as a neurotransmitter.
[citation needed] After his first talk on the work at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, David Nachmanson commented “Well, we don’t know what that little bit of an amino acid that you see being released is when you stimulate a nerve, but it certainly is not a chemical transmitter compound, because we all know that transmission is electrical”.
In the end they found a single dye, Procion Yellow, that was highly soluble, readily released from microelectrodes, completely filled cells and their processes, survived fixation and dehydration, and, most importantly, was fluorescent.
However, Kravitz soon realized that in order to discover new neurons and pathways that were important for aggression, he needed an organism whose genome was sequenced and where genetic methods were available for solving sophisticated problems, leading to work with Drosophila melanogaster.