Alan Hodgkin

Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin was an English physiologist and biophysicist who lived from 1914 to 1998. Born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, the eldest of three sons of Quaker parents, he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he came to focus on physiology and stayed on as a research fellow. With Andrew Huxley he recorded action potentials from inside the giant axon of the squid at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, and with Bernard Katz he showed that the permeability of the nerve cell membrane to sodium rises during an action potential. He shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Huxley and John Eccles. He was Foulerton Professor of the Royal Society at Cambridge from 1951 to 1969, John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Biophysics from 1970, President of the Royal Society, and from 1978 to 1985 the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.