Alan Lloyd Hodgkin

British physiologist (1914–)

Born at Banbury near Oxford, Hodgkin graduated from Cambridge University and became a fellow in 1936. He spent World War II working on radar for the Air Ministry. He then worked at the physiological laboratory at Cambridge, where he served as Foulerton Research Professor from 1952 to 1969 and as professor of biophysics from 1970 until 1981. He also served from 1978 to 1984 as master of Trinity College, Cambridge; he was knighted in 1972.

In 1951, with Andrew Huxley and Bernard Katz, he worked out the sodium theory to explain the difference in action and resting potentials in nerve fibers. Using the single nerve fiber (giant axon) of a squid, they were able to demonstrate that there is an exchange of sodium and potassium ions between the cell and its surroundings during a nervous impulse, which enables the nerve fiber to carry a further impulse. Hodgkin also showed that the nerve fiber's potential for electrical conduction was greater during the actual passage of an impulse than when the fiber is resting. For their work on the ‘sodium pump’ mechanism and the chemical basis of nerve transmission Hodgkin, Huxley, and John Eccles shared the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1963. He is the author of Conduction of the Nervous Impulse (1964). In 1992 he published his autobiography Chance and Design: Reminiscences of Science in Peace and War.

English physiologist Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin (born 1914) received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (along with Andrew Huxley and Sir John Eccles) in 1963 for discovery of the chemical processes responsible for passage of impulses along individual nerve fibers.

Alan Hodgkin was born on Feb. 5, 1914, in Banbury, Oxfordshire, England. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, he began research on the mechanism of nerve conduction, a field in which a strong tradition had been built up at Cambridge by Keith Lucas, A. V. Hill, and Lord Adrian. Within a year he had obtained clear evidence that the "local circuit" mechanism did explain the spread of activity from each point to the next as an impulse travels along a nerve fiber. For this work he was elected to a fellowship of Trinity College in 1936.

Early Work

Hodgkin's first work was carried out on whole nerve trunks dissected from frogs, the classical material for investigations on nerve conduction. All his subsequent work on nerve tissue was done on isolated single fibers. By World War II he had published important papers on "subthreshold" potentials, that is, the electric events that lead up to the full-size nerve impulse, and on the electrical resistance of the protoplasm and surface membrane of the giant nerve fiber. He also issued, jointly with A. F. Huxley, a preliminary note on recording with an electrode actually inside a squid giant nerve fiber.

Hodgkin spent most of the war years developing airborne radar. He returned to Cambridge in 1945, holding college and university teaching appointments. From 1952 to 1969 he was a research professor of the Royal Society, and from 1970 a newly founded university professor of biophysics. He worked during this period at the Physiological Laboratory of Cambridge, as well as the Marine Biological Association at Plymouth in the autumn, when squid were available. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine (with Andrew Huxley and Sir John Eccles) in 1963.

Later Work

Much of Hodgkin's later work was on muscle and had to do both with the relation of ions to the electrical changes and with the processes by which contraction is initiated within the fiber when an action potential passes along its surface membrane.

His publications include: Conduction of the Nerve Impulse (1964) and Chance and Design (1992).

Further Reading

There are very good accounts of Hodgkin's work in Bernard Katz, Nerve, Muscle, and Synapse (1966), and Hugh Davson, A Textbook of General Physiology (4th ed. 1970). There are sketches of his life and work in Sarah Regal Riedman and Elton T. Gustafson, Portraits of Nobel Laureates in Medicine and Physiology (1963), and in Theodore L. Sourkes, Nobel Prize Winners in Medicine and Physiology, 1901-1965 (rev. ed. 1967).

Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin
Born	5 February 1914(1914-02-05) Banbury, Oxfordshire, England
Died	20 December 1998 (aged 84) Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England
Nationality	United Kingdom
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1963)

Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, OM, KBE, FRS (5 February 1914, Banbury, Oxfordshire, England^[1] – 20 December 1998 Cambridge^[2]) was a British physiologist and biophysicist, who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Honours 4 See also 5 References

Early life

Hodgkin was educated at The Downs School (Malvern), Gresham's School, Holt, and Trinity College, Cambridge.^[3]

In 1930, he was the winner of a bronze medal in the Public Schools Essay Competition organized by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.^[4]

Career

During the Second World War, he volunteered to work on Aviation Medicine at Farnborough and was subsequently transferred to the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) where he worked on the development of centimetric radar, including the design of the Village Inn AGLT airborne gun-laying system. Earlier, in March 1941, Hodgkin had flown on the test flight of a Bristol Blenheim fitted with the first airborne centimetric radar system.

With Andrew Fielding Huxley, Hodgkin worked on experimental measurements and developed an action potential theory representing one of the earliest applications of a technique of electrophysiology, known as the "voltage clamp". The second critical element of their research was the so-called giant axon of Atlantic squid (Loligo pealei), which enabled them to record ionic currents as they would not have been able to do in almost any other neuron, such cells being too small to study by the techniques of the time. The experiments took place at the University of Cambridge beginning in 1935 with frog sciatic nerve and continuing into the 1940s, after interruption by World War II. Hodgkin and Huxley published their theory in 1952.

In 1963, with Huxley, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on the basis of nerve "action potentials," the electrical impulses which enable the activity of an organism to be coordinated by a central nervous system. Hodgkin and Huxley shared the prize that year with John Carew Eccles, who was cited for his research on synapses. Hodgkin and Huxley's findings led them to hypothesize ion channels, which were confirmed only decades later. Confirmation of ion channels came with the development of the patch clamp, which led to a Nobel prize in 1991 for Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann.

From 1971 to 1984, Hodgkin was Chancellor of University of Leicester.

From 1978 to 1984, Hodgkin was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Creator of the Hodgkin Cycle.

Honours

Hodgkin was knighted in 1972 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1973. From 1970 to 1975 he was President of the Royal Society.

See also

• Hodgkin-Huxley model

References

1. ^ GRO Register of Births: MAR 1914 3a 2167 BANBURY - Alan L. Hodgkin, mmn = Wilson
2. ^ GRO Register of Deaths: DEC 1998 B43C 32 CAMBRIDGE - Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, DoB = 5 Feb 1914, aged 84
3. ^ Benson, S. G. G., Crossley Evans, Martin, I Will Plant Me a Tree: an Illustrated History of Gresham's School (James & James, London, 2002) ISBN 0-907383-92-0
4. ^ Protection Of Birds Measures Urged By Royal Society in The Times, Saturday, Mar 29, 1930; pg. 14; Issue 45474; col C

• The Master of Trinity at Trinity College, Cambridge
• Nobel biography of Hodgkin
• BBC obituary
• Speech at Nobel banquet, 1963
• Action Potential Paper

Academic offices
Preceded by The Lord Butler of Saffron Walden	Master of Trinity College, Cambridge 1978–1984	Succeeded by Sir Andrew Huxley
Preceded by The Lord Adrian	Chancellor of the University of Leicester 1971–1984	Succeeded by Sir George Porter

v • d • e Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine Max Theiler (1951) · Selman Waksman (1952) · Hans Krebs / Fritz Lipmann (1953) · John Enders / Thomas Weller / Frederick Robbins (1954) · Hugo Theorell (1955) · André Cournand / Werner Forssmann / Dickinson W. Richards (1956) · Daniel Bovet (1957) · George Beadle / Edward Tatum / Joshua Lederberg (1958) · Severo Ochoa / Arthur Kornberg (1959) · Frank Burnet / Peter Medawar (1960) · Georg von Békésy (1961) · Francis Crick / James D. Watson / Maurice Wilkins (1962) · John Eccles / Alan Hodgkin / Andrew Huxley (1963) · Konrad Bloch / Feodor Lynen (1964) · François Jacob / André Lwoff / Jacques Monod (1965) · Francis Rous / Charles B. Huggins (1966) · Ragnar Granit / Haldan Hartline / George Wald (1967) · Robert W. Holley / Har Khorana / Marshall Nirenberg (1968) · Max Delbrück / Alfred Hershey / Salvador Luria (1969) · Bernard Katz / Ulf von Euler / Julius Axelrod (1970) · Earl Sutherland, Jr. (1971) · Gerald Edelman / Rodney Porter (1972) · Karl von Frisch / Konrad Lorenz / Nikolaas Tinbergen (1973) · Albert Claude / Christian de Duve / George Palade (1974) · David Baltimore / Renato Dulbecco / Howard Temin (1975) Complete roster · 1901–1925 · 1926–1950 · 1951–1975 · 1976–2000 · 2001–present

v • d • e Presidents of the Royal Society William Huggins (1900) · John Strutt (1905) · Archibald Geikie (1908) · William Crookes (1913) · Joseph John Thomson (1915) · Charles Scott Sherrington (1920) · Ernest Rutherford (1925) · Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1930) · William Henry Bragg (1935) · Henry Hallett Dale (1940) · Robert Robinson (1945) · Edgar Adrian (1950) · Cyril Norman Hinshelwood (1955) · Howard Florey (1960) · Patrick Blackett (1965) · Alan Lloyd Hodgkin (1970) · Alexander R. Todd (1975) · Andrew Huxley (1980) · George Porter (1985) · Michael Atiyah (1990) · Aaron Klug (1995) Robert May (2000) · Martin Rees (2005) Complete roster: 1600s · 1700s · 1800s · 1900s · 2000s

Persondata
NAME	Hodgkin, Alan Lloyd
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	physiologist and biophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH	1914-02-05
PLACE OF BIRTH	Banbury, Oxfordshire, England
DATE OF DEATH	1998-12-20
PLACE OF DEATH

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