Hugh Huxley

Who was Hugh Huxley?

Hugh Esmor Huxley MBE FRS was a British molecular biologist who made important discoveries in the physiology of muscle. He was a graduate in physics from Christ's College, Cambridge. However, his education was interrupted for five years by the Second World War, during which he served in the British Royal Air Force. His contribution to development of radar earned him an MBE.

Huxley was the first PhD student of Laboratory of Molecular Biology of the Medical Research Council at Cambridge, where he worked on X-ray diffraction studies on muscle fibres. In the 1950s he was one of the first to use electron microscopy to study biological specimens. During his postdoctoral at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he, with fellow researcher Jean Hanson, discovered the underlying principle of muscle movement, popularised as the sliding filament theory in 1954. After 15 years of reseach, he prosposed the "swinging cross-bridge hypothesis" in 1969, which became modern understanding of the molecular basis of muscle contration, and much of other cellular motility.

Huxley worked at University College London for seven years, and at Laboratory of Molecular Biology for fifteen years, where he was its Deputy Director from 1979. Between 1987 and 1997, he was professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where he spent the rest of his life as emeritus professor.