Andrew Huxley, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Andrew Huxley

English physiologist and biophysicist

Date of Birth: 22-Nov-1917

Place of Birth: Hampstead, England, United Kingdom

Date of Death: 30-May-2012

Profession: physician, physicist, physiologist, neuroscientist, biophysicist

Nationality: United Kingdom

Zodiac Sign: Sagittarius


Show Famous Birthdays Today, United Kingdom

👉 Worldwide Celebrity Birthdays Today

About Andrew Huxley

  • Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley (22 November 1917 – 30 May 2012) was an 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 the Second World War, Huxley 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. In 1952, he was joined by a German physiologist Rolf Niedergerke.
  • Together they discovered in 1954 the mechanism of muscle contraction, popularly called the "sliding filament theory", which is the foundation of our modern understanding of muscle mechanics.
  • In 1960 he became head of the Department of Physiology at University College London.
  • He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1955, and President in 1980.
  • The Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal in 1973 for his collective contributions to the understanding of nerve impulses and muscle contraction.
  • He was conferred a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974, and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1983.
  • He was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, until his death.

Read more at Wikipedia

See Also