Andrew Huxley

Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley was an English physiologist and biophysicist who lived from 1917 to 2012. Born in Hampstead, London, into the prominent Huxley family, he was a half-brother of the writer Aldous Huxley and the biologist Julian Huxley and a grandson of the biologist T. H. Huxley. After Westminster School he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, on a scholarship and joined Alan Hodgkin to study nerve impulses. Working on the giant axon of the Atlantic squid, the two explained how an action potential travels along a nerve, a discovery that earned them the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. After the Second World War he developed an interference microscope suited to muscle fibres, and in 1954 he and Rolf Niedergerke found the sliding filament mechanism of muscle contraction. He headed physiology at University College London from 1960, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1955 and served as its President from 1980.