Andrew Huxley

Andrew Huxley (1917–2012) was a British physiologist and biophysicist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize for explaining how nerve impulses travel.

Hodgkin–Huxley model: A mathematical model describing how ionic currents across a nerve-cell membrane generate and propagate an action potential. Huxley and Alan Hodgkin built this quantitative account from their squid-axon experiments.
Alan Hodgkin: A British physiologist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize for research on the ionic basis of nerve impulses. Hodgkin and Huxley jointly developed the model and conducted the key squid-axon experiments.
Squid giant axon: An unusually large nerve fiber in squid, adapted for rapidly conducting signals to the animal’s mantle muscles. Its size made electrical recording and control of membrane voltage experimentally practical.
Muscle contraction: The process by which muscle fibers generate tension and shorten through interactions among contractile proteins. Huxley later helped explain contraction through a theory of interactions between actin and myosin.
Chemical synapse: A junction where one cell communicates with another by releasing chemical neurotransmitters. Huxley’s central work explained electrical signaling along axons, not neurotransmitter release across synapses.
Action potential: A brief, regenerative change in a cell’s membrane voltage that carries signals in excitable cells. The model explains the electrical event Huxley investigated.
Bernard Katz: A German-born British biophysicist who studied synaptic transmission and shared the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Katz shared Huxley’s 1963 Nobel recognition for research on nerve impulses.
Voltage clamp: An electrophysiological method that holds a cell’s membrane voltage at a chosen value while measuring ionic current. Hodgkin and Huxley used voltage clamp to separate currents underlying the impulse.
Cross-bridge theory: A model in which myosin heads cyclically bind to and pull on actin filaments to generate muscle force. Huxley’s work with Rolf Niedergerke helped establish this account of muscle contraction.
Saltatory conduction: The propagation of action potentials between nodes of Ranvier along a myelinated axon. This mode of propagation differs from the continuous axonal conduction modeled in Huxley’s squid experiments.

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