Huxley, Andrew Fielding (1917– )

English physiologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1963 with Alan Hodgkin for work on the ionic mechanisms involved in the communication or inhibition of impulses across neuron (nerve cell) membranes impulses. He was knighted in 1974.

Huxley was born in London, the grandson of scientist T H Huxley. He was educated at Cambridge and did military research during World War II. After the war, he returned to Cambridge. In 1960 he became professor at University College, London.

In 1945 at Cambridge, Hodgkin and Huxley began to measure the electrochemical behaviour of nerve membranes. They experimented on axons of the giant squid – each axon is about 0.7 mm/0.03 in in diameter. They inserted a glass capillary tube filled with sea water into the axon to test the composition of the ions in and surrounding the cell, which also had a microelectrode inserted into it. Stimulating the axon with a pair of outside electrodes, they showed that the inside of the cell was at first negative (the resting potential) and the outside positive, and that during the conduction of the nerve impulse the membrane potential reversed.