Andrew Huxley: The Physiologist Who Mathematically Mapped the Nerve Impulse

On November twenty-second, nineteen seventeen, Andrew Fielding Huxley was born in Hampstead, England. He was a physiologist and biophysicist, and his academic field was neurophysiology and biophysics.

Huxley is most famous for his groundbreaking work with Alan Lloyd Hodgkin. In the nineteen-fifties, they succeeded in explaining the exact mechanism behind the action potential – the electrical impulse that enables nerves to transmit signals. Through experiments with the giant axon of the squid and using an advanced mathematical model, they showed that the nerve impulse is not a passive signal that weakens, but a self-reinforcing wave. They demonstrated how voltage-gated ion channels in the nerve cell's membrane open and close for sodium and potassium ions, creating a rapid and reversible change in the membrane potential. This "Hodgkin-Huxley model" was not only a complete explanation of a fundamental biological phenomenon, it was also a pioneering work in biophysics that combined experimental biology with theoretical modeling. For this discovery, Huxley and Hodgkin were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in nineteen sixty-three. Huxley also made significant contributions to the understanding of muscle contraction.