In 1910, Joseph Erlanger was invited by Washington University to head the Department of Physiology in the newly reorganized School of Medicine.   Herbert Gasser joined the department shortly after and he and Erlanger began a collaboration in studies on fundamental properties of nerve.    Erlanger and Gasser built and assembled the requisite equipment for stimulation and recording.   With it they investigated the characteristics of conduction nerve axons.   Together with George Bishop, who subsequently joined in the work, they determined the speed of conduction in nerve fibers and its relation to axonal diameter, the independence of action potentials, in individual nerve fibers, the time course of the individual action potentials, the refractory period after an action potential and a host of other properties which are fundamental to our understanding of nerve physiology.   In 1921 Gasser was made Head of the Department of Pharmacology at Washington University.   He continued collaborating with Erlanger and Bishop.   They were very successful in reconstructing the compound action potential from the fiber diameter spectrum, their values for action potential size and duration, and assuming a linear relation between axon diameter and conduction velocity.   In 1944, Erlanger and Gasser were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for these studies.