“There must have been 40 or more descendents of TH Huxley older than myself and there were only two scientists before me.”
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Andrew Huxley
Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley 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. Their eventual discovery of the basis for propagation of nerve impulses earned them the Nobel Prize in Physiolog…
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science · English physiologist and biophysicist (1917–2012) · neuroscientist · physicist · physician · physiologist · biophysicist · also Andrew Huxley, Sir Andrew Huxley, Andrew Fielding Huxley, Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley, A. F. Huxley, Huxley
Born 22 November 1917 · Died 30 May 2012 · Q104607
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2026· 1 entry
2012· 2 entries
Died 2012-05-30.
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“I am very conscious that there is no scientific explanation for the fact that we are conscious.”
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1997· 1 entry
Won Swammerdam Medal (1997).
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1986· 1 entry
Was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering then known as the Fellowship of Engineering
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1984· 2 entries
Was elected Master of Trinity, succeeding his longtime collaborator, Sir Alan Hodgkin
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Career landmark: Master of Trinity College, Cambridge (1984–1990).
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1983· 1 entry
Defended the Society's decision to elect Margaret Thatcher as a fellow on the ground of her support for science even after 44 fellows had signed a letter of protest
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1981· 2 entries
Awarded honorary doctorate of the University of the Mediterranean - Aix Marseille II (1981).
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Chose to defend the Darwinian explanation of evolution, as his ancestor, T
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1980· 2 entries
Career landmark: President of the Royal Society (1980–1985).
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Huxley was elected as President of the Royal Society, a post he held until 1985
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1975· 2 entries
Won Baly Medal (1975).
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And the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1979
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1974· 1 entry
And was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1983
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1973· 3 entries
Won Copley Medal (1973).
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Awarded Annual Review Prize Lecture (1973).
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For his collective contributions to the understanding of nerve impulses and muscle contraction
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1969· 1 entry
Was appointed to a Royal Society Research Professorship, which he held in the Department of Physiology at University College London
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1967· 1 entry
Won Croonian Medal and Lecture (1967).
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1966· 1 entry
His team provided the proof of the theory, and has remained the basis of modern understanding of muscle physiology
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1964· 1 entry
Awarded honorary doctor of the Saarland University (1964).
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1963· 3 entries
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — for their discoveries concerning the ionic mechanisms involved in excitation and inhibition in the peripheral and central portions of the nerve cell membrane.
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Awarded Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1963).
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Was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his part in discoveries concerning the ionic mechanisms of the nerve cell
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1961· 1 entry
Lectured on neurophysiology at Kiev University as part of an exchange scheme between British and Russian professors
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1960· 1 entry
Became head of the Department of Physiology at University College London
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1959· 1 entry
And the Jesup Lectures at Columbia University in 1964
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1955· 3 entries
Awarded Fellow of the Royal Society (1955).
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And was awarded its Copley Medal in 1973 "in recognition of his outstanding studies on the mechanisms of the nerve impulse and of activation of muscular contraction
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Was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and served on the Council of the Royal Society from 1960 to 1962
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1954· 1 entry
The mechanism of muscle contraction, popularly called the "sliding filament theory", which is the foundation of our modern understanding of muscle mechanics
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1953· 1 entry
Huxley worked at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, as a Lalor Scholar
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1952· 3 entries
Having completed work on action potentials, Huxley was teaching physiology at Cambridge and became interested in another difficult, unsolved problem: how does muscle contract
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Published their theory of how action potentials are transmitted in a joint paper, in which they also describe one of the earliest computational models in biochemistry
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Was joined by a German physiologist Rolf Niedergerke
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1948· 1 entry
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).
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1947· 1 entry
Huxley married Jocelyn "Richenda" Gammell (née Pease), the daughter of the geneticist Michael Pease (a son of Edward R
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1946· 1 entry
With the war ended, he was able to take this up and to resume his collaboration with Hodgkin on understanding how nerves transmit signals
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1939· 2 entries
Alan Lloyd Hodgkin returned from the US to take up a fellowship at Trinity College, and Huxley became one of his postgraduate students
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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
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1935· 2 entries
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
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Huxley graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1938
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1930· 1 entry
Studied at Westminster School (1930).
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1917· 1 entry
Born 1917-11-22.
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