Andrew Huxley

SIR ANDREW HUXLEY d2012. English physiologist and biophysicist. He was born into the prominent Huxley family. After graduating from Westminster School in Central London (from where he won a scholarship to Trinity College Cambridge) he joined Alan Lloyd Hodgkin to study nerve impulses. Their eventual discovery of the basis for propagation of nerve impulses (called an action potential) earned them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963. They made their discovery from the giant axon of the Atlantic squid. Soon after the outbreak of WW2, he was recruited by the British Anti-Aircraft Command and later transferred to the Admiralty. After the war he resumed research at the University of Cambridge where he developed interference microscopy that would be suitable for studying muscle fibres. He died in Cambridge aged 94 on May 30th 2012