Andrew Huxley

See also: Huxley

Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley , OM, (born the November 22nd 1917 with Hampstead, in the suburbs of London) is an English biophysicist and physiologist, prize winner in 1963 with John Carew Eccles and Alan Lloyd Hodgkin of the Nobel Prize of Medicine and Physiology for its role in the discovery of the ionic mechanisms of the nervous transmission. Following their work, Hodgkin and Huxley postulated the existence of the ionic Canaux selective, which was confirmed only several tens of years later, by Erwin Neher and Bert Sackman, which will obtain them also the Nobel Prize for their discovery. Another application of their research is the model known as of Hodgkin-Huxley used in neuro-data processing.

The experiments on which Hodgkin and Huxley based their theory of the Potentiel of action historically represents one of the first applications of the technique of known electrophysiology under the name of Voltage clamp (measurement of current in condition of imposed tension). It is axon giant of squid (Loligo pelaeii), which enabled them to record the ionic currents, which would have been impossible to them on almost all the other types of Neuron S, these cells being too small to be able to be studied with the techniques of this time. These experiments were carried out with the Université of Cambridge starting from the Années 1930 and continued until the end of the Années 1940, after the interruption of the Second world war. Their work was published in 1952.

A. Huxley was the first with Hodgkin to show that the genesis of the Potentiel of action is due to the activation of selective conductances to sodium then with potassium.

One owes him also the first description, with the Swiss physiologist Robert Stämpfli, of conduction saltatoire of the potentials of action along the nervous fibers myelinized.

Huxley is always currently member of the Trinity College of Cambridge and professor of Physiologie, Natural science and Médecine.

Family ties

Andrew F. Huxley is one of wire of the writer and editor Leonard Huxley and of his second wife Rosalind Bruce. He is thus the half-brother of the writer Aldous Huxley and of the Biologiste Julian Huxley and the grandson of the Biologiste Thomas Henry Huxley.
In 1947 it married Jocelyn Richenda Gammell Pease (1925 - 2003), the girl of the Généticien Michael Pease and of Helen Bowen Wedgwood, itself girl of Josiah Wedgwood IV.

Distinctions

Huxley was elected member of the Royal Society the March 17th 1955 and was made knight by the Reine Elizabeth II the November 12th 1974.
Sir Andrew was high thereafter with the Order of Merit the November 11th 1983.

External bond

Biography on the site of the foundation Nobel

Random links: