Andrew Huxley
HonFREng | |
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Born | Andrew Fielding Huxley 22 November 1917 Hampstead, London, England |
Died | 30 May 2012 Cambridge, England | (aged 94)
Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
Known for | |
Spouse |
J. Richenda G. Pease
(m. 1947; died 2003) |
Children | 6 |
Parent |
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Relatives | Huxley family |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions |
Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley
In 1952, he was joined by a German physiologist
Early life and education
Huxley was born in
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.[3]
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.[4]
Career
Having entered Cambridge in 1935, Huxley graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1938. In 1939,
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.
Huxley was elected to a research fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1941. In 1946, with the war ended, he was able to take this up and to resume his collaboration with Hodgkin on understanding how nerves transmit signals. Continuing their work in Plymouth, they were, within six years, able to solve the problem using equipment they built themselves. The solution was that nerve impulses, or action potentials, do not travel down the core of the fiber, but rather along the outer membrane of the fiber as cascading waves of sodium ions diffusing inward on a rising pulse and potassium ions diffusing out on a falling edge of a pulse. In 1952, they published their theory of how
In 1952, having completed work on action potentials, Huxley was teaching physiology at Cambridge and became interested in another difficult, unsolved problem: how does muscle contract? To make progress on understanding the function of muscle, new ways of observing how the network of filaments behave during contraction were needed. Prior to the war, he had been working on a preliminary design for interference microscopy, which at the time he believed to be original, though it turned out to have been tried 50 years before and abandoned. He, however, was able to make interference microscopy work and to apply it to the problem of muscle contraction with great effect. He was able to view muscle contraction with greater precision than conventional microscopes, and to distinguish types of fiber more easily. By 1953, with the assistance of Rolf Niedergerke, he began to find the features of muscle movement. Around that time, Hugh Huxley and Jean Hanson came to a similar observation. Authored in pairs, their papers were simultaneously published in the 22 May 1954 issue of Nature.[9][10] Thus the four people introduced what is called the sliding filament theory of muscle contractions.[11] Huxley synthesized his findings, and the work of colleagues, into a detailed description of muscle structure and how muscle contraction occurs and generates force that he published in 1957.[12] In 1966 his team provided the proof of the theory, and has remained the basis of modern understanding of muscle physiology.[13]
In 1953, Huxley worked at
He was an editor of the
Huxley held college and university posts in Cambridge until 1960, when he became head of the Department of Physiology at University College London. In addition to his administrative and teaching duties, he continued to work actively on muscle contraction, and also made theoretical contributions to other work in the department, such as that on animal reflectors.[15] In 1963, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his part in discoveries concerning the ionic mechanisms of the nerve cell.[4] In 1969 he was appointed to a Royal Society Research Professorship, which he held in the Department of Physiology at University College London.
In 1980, Huxley was elected as President of the Royal Society, a post he held until 1985. In his Presidential Address in 1981, he chose to defend the
In 1984, he was elected Master of Trinity, succeeding his longtime collaborator, Sir Alan Hodgkin. His appointment broke the tradition that the office of Master of Trinity alternates between a scientist and an arts man. He was Master until 1990 and was fond of reminding interviewers that Trinity College had more Nobel Prize winners than did the whole of France. He maintained up to his death his position as a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, teaching in physiology, natural sciences and medicine.[16] He was also a fellow of Imperial College London in 1980.[17]
From his experimental work with Hodgkin, Huxley developed a set of differential equations that provided a mathematical explanation for nerve impulses—the "action potential". This work provided the foundation for all of the current work on voltage-sensitive membrane channels, which are responsible for the functioning of animal nervous systems. Quite separately, he developed the mathematical equations for the operation of myosin "cross-bridges" that generate the sliding forces between actin and myosin filaments, which cause the contraction of skeletal muscles. These equations presented an entirely new paradigm for understanding muscle contraction, which has been extended to provide understanding of almost all of the movements produced by cells above the level of bacteria. Together with the Swiss physiologist Robert Stämpfli, he evidenced the existence of saltatory conduction in myelinated nerve fibres.
Awards and honours
Huxley, Alan Hodgkin and
Huxley was elected a
Huxley's portrait by David Poole hangs in Trinity College's collection.[23]
Personal life
In 1947, Huxley married Jocelyn "Richenda" Gammell (née Pease), the daughter of the geneticist Michael Pease (a son of Edward R. Pease) and his wife Helen Bowen Wedgwood, eldest daughter of the first Lord Wedgwood (see also Darwin–Wedgwood family). They had one son and five daughters – Janet Rachel Huxley (born 20 April 1948), Stewart Leonard Huxley (born 19 December 1949), Camilla Rosalind Huxley (born 12 March 1952), Eleanor Bruce Huxley (born 21 February 1959), Henrietta Catherine Huxley (born 25 December 1960), and Clare Marjory Pease Huxley (born 4 November 1962).
Death
Huxley died on 30 May 2012. He was survived by his six children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. His wife Richenda, Lady Huxley died in 2003, aged 78. A funeral service was held in Trinity College Chapel on 13 June 2012, followed by a private cremation.[24]
Publications
- Huxley, A. F., 1980. Reflections on muscle. The Sherrington Lectures XIV. Liverpool.
Popular culture
Huxley was mentioned in S11 E6 of Archer: "The Double Date".
See also
References
- ISBN 0-12-660246-8.
- PMID 22739307.
- ^ ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 16 December 2023.
- ^ NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 16 December 2023.
- ISBN 978-1-61069-338-7.
- S2CID 4104520.
- ^ Le Novère, Nicolas. "hodgkin-huxley squid-axon 1952". BioModels. Retrieved 15 December 2023.
- ISBN 978-1-60807-108-1.
- S2CID 4275495.
- S2CID 4180166.
- S2CID 222198517.
- PMID 13485191.
- PMID 5921536.
- .
- .
- ^ The Master of Trinity at Trinity College, Cambridge[dead link]
- ^ "Nobel Laureates associated with Imperial College London". Imperial College London. 11 September 2023.[dead link]
- ^ "Copley Medal". Royal Society. Retrieved 16 December 2023.
- ^ "Andrew Fielding Huxley". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 1 August 2022.
- ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 1 August 2022.
- ^ "Andrew Huxley". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 1 August 2022.
- ^ "Huxley, Sir Andrew Fielding". UK Who's Who online. Retrieved 7 October 2023.
- ^ "Trinity College, University of Cambridge". BBC Your Paintings. Archived from the original on 11 May 2014. Retrieved 12 February 2018.
- ^ "Sir Andrew Huxley (1917–2012)". Trinity College, Cambridge. Retrieved 25 February 2014.
External links
- Andrew Huxley on Nobelprize.org
- Portraits of Andrew Huxley at the National Portrait Gallery, London
- Huxley, Andrew. "Andrew Huxley" (Interview). Interviewed by Macfarlane, Alan; Harrison, Sarah.
- "Physicist discovered key to brain science". The Sydney Morning Herald. The New York Times. 5 June 2012.
- Watts, Geoff (30 June 2012). "Andrew Fielding Huxley". ISSN 0140-6736.