Von Euler was the son of Karl von Euler-Chelpin, Nobel Prize winner in 1929. He was born in the Swedish capital of Stockholm and educated at the Karolinska Institute, where he obtained his MD in 1930. He taught there from 1930 onward becoming, in 1939, professor of physiology. In 1966 von Euler was elected to the powerful position of president of the Nobel Foundation, which he held until 1975.

In 1906 the idea that nerve cells communicate with each other and the muscles they control by the release of chemicals was first proposed by Thomas Elliott. Since then there had been much searching for the elusive neurotransmitters and it was not until 1946 that von Euler succeeded in isolating that of the sympathetic system and showed it to be noradrenaline (norepinephrine). For this work von Euler shared the 1970 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with Julius Axelrod and Bernard Katxz.

Von Euler had earlier, in 1935, discovered a substance in human semen showing great physiological potency. As he assumed it came from the prostate gland he named it ‘prostaglandin’. It later turned out that prostaglandins could be found in many other human tissues; however, his deduction that they were fatty acids has since been confirmed.