Edgar Adrian

Edgar Adrian was an English physiologist whose experiments established how nerve impulses travel and vary in strength. He shared the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Charles Sherrington.

Action potential: A brief, regenerative change in a cell’s membrane voltage that carries electrical signals along excitable cells. Adrian measured these impulses in sensory nerves and showed their all-or-none character.
Single-nerve-fiber recording: An electrophysiological method for measuring impulses from one nerve fiber at a time. Adrian used isolated fibers to reveal properties hidden in recordings from whole nerves.
Charles Sherrington: An English neurophysiologist who developed influential accounts of reflexes, synapses, and nervous-system integration. Adrian shared the 1932 Nobel Prize with Sherrington for discoveries concerning neuron function.
University of Cambridge: A university in Cambridge, England, founded in 1209 and comprising a federation of colleges. Adrian studied and conducted much of his influential physiological research there.
Neurophysiology: The study of the function and electrical activity of the nervous system. Adrian’s experiments helped make quantitative nerve activity a central subject of the field.
All-or-none law: The principle that an individual excitable fiber produces a full action potential or none, rather than a graded impulse. Adrian’s nerve recordings helped establish that impulse size stays constant within a single fiber.
Muscle spindle: A sensory receptor in skeletal muscle that detects muscle length and changes in stretch. Adrian recorded its impulses to investigate how sensory discharge tracks muscle stretch.
Alan Hodgkin: A British physiologist who helped explain the ionic basis of the nerve action potential. Hodgkin’s later work extended the electrical physiology that Adrian had established experimentally.
Trinity College, Cambridge: A constituent college of the University of Cambridge, founded in 1546. Adrian studied at Trinity before beginning his research career in Cambridge physiology.
Nerve conduction velocity: The speed at which an action potential travels along a nerve fiber. Adrian’s recordings contributed to understanding how impulse timing varies among nerve fibers.

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