Alan Hodgkin

Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin (5 February 1914 – 20 December 1998) was an English physiologist and biophysicist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Huxley and John Eccles.

Hodgkin was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, on 5 February 1914.

He was the oldest of three sons of Quakers George Hodgkin and Mary Wilson Hodgkin.

His father was the son of Thomas Hodgkin and had read for the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge where he had befriended electrophysiologist Keith Lucas.

Because of poor eyesight he was unable to study medicine and eventually ended up working for a bank in Banbury.

As members of the Society of Friends, George and Mary opposed the Military Service Act of 1916, which introduced conscription, and had to endure a great deal of abuse from their local community, including an attempt to throw George in one of the town canals.

In 1916, George Hodgkin travelled to Armenia as part of an investigation of distress.

Moved by the misery and suffering of Armenian refugees he attempted to go back there in 1918 on a route through the Persian Gulf (as the northern route was closed because of the October Revolution in Russia).

He died of dysentery in Baghdad on 24 June 1918, just a few weeks after his youngest son, Keith, had been born.

From an early life on, Hodgkin and his brothers were encouraged to explore the country around their home, which instilled in Alan an interest in natural history, particularly ornithology.

At the age of 15, he helped Wilfred Backhouse Alexander with surveys of heronries and later, at Gresham's School, he overlapped and spent a lot of time with David Lack.

In 1930, he was the winner of a bronze medal in the Public Schools Essay Competition organised by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Alan started his education at The Downs School where his contemporaries included future scientists Frederick Sanger, Alec Bangham, "neither outstandingly brilliant at school" according to Hodgkin, as well as future artists Lawrence Gowing and Kenneth Rowntree.

After the Downs School, he went on to Gresham's School where he overlapped with future composer Benjamin Britten as well as Maury Meiklejohn.

He ended up receiving a scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge in botany, zoology and chemistry.

Between school and college, he spent May 1932 at the Freshwater Biological Station at Wray Castle based on a recommendation of his future Director of Studies at Trinity, Carl Pantin.

After Wray Castle, he spent two months with a German family in Frankfurt as "in those days it was thought highly desirable that anyone intending to read science should have a reasonable knowledge of German."

After his return to England in early August 1932, his mother Mary was remarried to Lionel Smith (1880–1972), the eldest son of A. L. Smith, whose daughter Dorothy was also married to Alan's uncle Robert Howard Hodgkin.

In the autumn of 1932, Hodgkin started as a freshman scholar at Trinity College where his friends included classicists John Raven and Michael Grant, fellow-scientists Richard Synge and John H. Humphrey, as well as Polly and David Hill, the children of Nobel laureate Archibald Hill.

He took physiology with chemistry and zoology for the first two years, including lectures by Nobel laureate E.D. Adrian.

For Part II of the tripos he decided to focus on physiology instead of zoology.

Despite his Quaker upbringing, Hodgkin was eager to join the war effort as contact with the Nazis during his stay in Germany in 1932 had removed all his pacifist beliefs.

His first post was at the Royal Aircraft Establishment where he worked on issues in aviation medicine, such as oxygen supply for pilots at high altitudes and the decompression sickness caused by nitrogen bubbles coming out of the blood.

Nevertheless, he participated in a zoological expedition to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco led by John Pringle in 1934.

Hodgkin started conducting experiments on how electrical activity is transmitted in the sciatic nerve of frogs in July 1934.

He found that a nerve impulse arriving at a cold or compression block, can decrease the electrical threshold beyond the block, suggesting that the impulse produces a spread of an electrotonic potential in the nerve beyond the block.

He finished Part II of the tripos in July 1935 and stayed at Trinity as a research fellow.

During his studies, Hodgkin, who described himself as "having been brought up as a supporter of the British Labour Party" was friends with communists and actively participated in the distribution of anti-war pamphlets.

At Cambridge, he knew James Klugmann and John Cornford, but he emphasised in his autobiography that none of his friends "made any serious effort to convert me [to Communism], either then or later."

From 1935 to 1937, Hodgkin was a member of the Cambridge Apostles.

After his return to Cambridge he started collaborating with Andrew Huxley who had entered Trinity as a freshman in 1935, three years after Hodgkin.

With a £300 equipment grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Hodgkin managed to set up a similar physiology setup to the one he had worked with at the Rockefeller Institute.

In 1936, Hodgkin was invited by Herbert Gasser, then director of the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, to work in his laboratory during 1937–38.

There he met Rafael Lorente de Nó and Kenneth Stewart Cole with whom he ended up publishing a paper.

During that year he also spent time at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory where he was introduced to the squid giant axon, which ended up being the model system with which he conducted most of the research that eventually led to his Nobel Prize.

In the spring of 1938, he visited Joseph Erlanger at Washington University in St. Louis who told him he would take Hodgkin's local circuit theory of nerve impulse propagation seriously if he could show that altering the resistance of the fluid outside a nerve fibre made a difference to the velocity of nerve impulse conduction.

Working with single nerve fibres from shore crabs and squids, he showed that the conduction rate was much faster in seawater than in oil, providing strong evidence for the local circuit theory.

He moved all his equipment to the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in July 1939.

There, he and Huxley managed to insert a fine cannula into the giant axon of squids and record action potentials from inside the nerve fibre.

They sent a short note of their success to Nature just before the outbreak of World War II.