Andrew Huxley

Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley (22 November 1917 – 30 May 2012) was an English physiologist and biophysicist.

He was born into the prominent Huxley family.

After leaving Westminster School in central London, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, on a scholarship, after which he joined Alan Hodgkin to study nerve impulses.

Huxley was born in Hampstead, London, England, on 22 November 1917.

He was the youngest son of the writer and editor Leonard Huxley by Leonard Huxley's second wife Rosalind Bruce, and hence half-brother of the writer Aldous Huxley and fellow biologist Julian Huxley, and grandson of the biologist T. H. Huxley.

When he was about 12, Andrew and his brother David were given a lathe by their parents.

Andrew soon became proficient at designing, making and assembling mechanical objects of all kinds, from wooden candle sticks to a working internal combustion engine.

He used these practical skills throughout his career, building much of the specialized equipment he needed for his research.

It was also in his early teens that he formed his lifelong interest in microscopy.

He was educated at University College School and Westminster School in Central London, where he was a King's Scholar.

He graduated and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read natural sciences.

He had intended to become an engineer but switched to physiology after taking the subject to fulfill an elective.

Having entered Cambridge in 1935, Huxley graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1938.

Beginning in 1935 in Cambridge, he had made preliminary measurements on frog sciatic nerves suggesting that the accepted view of the nerve as a simple, elongated battery was flawed.

Hodgkin invited Huxley to join him researching the problem.

The work was experimentally challenging.

One major problem was that the small size of most neurons made it extremely difficult to study them using the techniques of the time.

They overcame this by working at the Marine Biological Association laboratory in Plymouth using the giant axon of the longfin inshore squid (Doryteuthis (formerly Loligo) pealeii), which have the largest neurons known.

The experiments were still extremely challenging as the nerve impulses only last a fraction of a millisecond, during which time they needed to measure the changing electrical potential at different points along the nerve.

Using equipment largely of their own construction and design, including one of the earliest applications of a technique of electrophysiology known as the voltage clamp, they were able to record ionic currents.

In 1939, Alan Lloyd Hodgkin returned from the US to take up a fellowship at Trinity College, and Huxley became one of his postgraduate students.

Hodgkin was interested in the transmission of electrical signals along nerve fibres.

In 1939, they jointly published a short paper in Nature reporting on the work done in Plymouth and announcing their achievement of recording action potentials from inside a nerve fibre.

Then World War II broke out, and their research was abandoned.

Huxley was recruited by the British Anti-Aircraft Command, where he worked on radar control of anti-aircraft guns.

Later he was transferred to the Admiralty to do work on naval gunnery, and worked in a team led by Patrick Blackett.

Hodgkin, meanwhile, was working on the development of radar at the Air Ministry.

When he had a problem concerning a new type of gun sight, he contacted Huxley for advice.

Huxley did a few sketches, borrowed a lathe and produced the necessary parts.

In 1952, he was joined by a German physiologist Rolf Niedergerke.

Together they discovered in 1954 the mechanism of muscle contraction, popularly called the "sliding filament theory", which is the foundation of our modern understanding of muscle mechanics.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1955, and President in 1980.

In 1960 he became head of the Department of Physiology at University College London.

Their eventual discovery of the basis for propagation of nerve impulses (called an action potential) earned them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963.

They made their discovery from the giant axon of the Atlantic squid.

Soon after the outbreak of the Second World War, Huxley was recruited by the British Anti-Aircraft Command and later transferred to the Admiralty.

After the war he resumed research at the University of Cambridge, where he developed interference microscopy that would be suitable for studying muscle fibres.

The Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal in 1973 for his collective contributions to the understanding of nerve impulses and muscle contraction.

He was conferred a Knight Bachelor by the Queen in 1974, and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1983.

He was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, until his death.