Andrew Huxley

Who was Andrew Huxley?

Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley, OM, PRS was a Nobel Prize-winning English physiologist and biophysicist. He was born of a 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 propagation of nerve impulses 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 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 Cambridge University, 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 modern understanding of muscle mechanics. In 1960 he became head of the Department of Physiology at University College London.