Andrew Huxley
From Philosopedia
Andrew Fielding Huxley (Sir) (22 November 1917 - )
Huxley was born in Hampstead, London, the son of Leonard Huxley, who was a son of the nineteenth- century scientist and writer Thomas Huxley. After his first wife's death, Andrew's father married Rosalind Bruce, and Andrew is the youngest of the two sons of this marriage. His father died in 1933.
Huxley received his M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, where later, from 1941 to 1960, he was a fellow and then director of studies, a demonstrator, an assistant director of research, and finally a reader in experimental biophysics in the Department of Physiology. In 1960 he went to University College, London, first as Jodrell professor and then, from 1969, as Royal Society research professor, in the Department of Physiology.
Huxley and Hodgkin's researches were concerned largely with studying the exchange of sodium and potassium ions that causes a brief reversal in a nerve cell's electrical polarization; this phenomenon, known as an action potential, results in the transmission of an impulse along a nerve fibre. Apart from the researches directly mentioned in the Nobel citation, Huxley made contributions of fundamental importance to knowledge of the process of contraction by a muscle fibre. He published many important papers in periodicals, particularly in the Journal of Physiology. His Sherrington Lectures were published as Reflections on Muscle (1980).
The children of his first marriage included Sir Julian Huxley, the biologist, and [http://philosopedia.org/index.php?title=Aldous_Huxley Aldous Huxley, the writer.
In 1947 Andrew Huxley married Jocelyn Richenda Gammell Pease, daughter of M. S. Pease, a geneticist, and the Hon. H. B. Pease (née Wedgwood). Mrs. Huxley is a Justice of the Peace, and is active in a variety of public work in Cambridgeshire. They have six children: Janet Rachel (born 20 April 1948), who read Biochemistry at Bristol University; Stewart Leonard (born 19 December 1949), who read engineering at Cambridge University; Camilla Rosalind (born 12 March 1952), who entered Cambridge University in 1971; Eleanor Bruce (born 21 February 1959); Henrietta Catherine (born 25 December 1960); and Clare Marjory Pease (born 4 November 1962).
A physiologist, Huxley became cowinner (with Sir Alan Hodgkin and Sir John Carew Eccles) of the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. His researches centred on nerve and muscle fibres and dealt particularly with the chemical phenomena involved in the transmission of nerve impulses. He received a knighthood in 1974.
