Sir Alan Hodgkin—Nobel Prize Winner for Nerve Transmission

Marc A. Shampo, Ph.D., and Robert A. Kyle, M.D.

Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, British physiologist and biophysicist, shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Andrew Huxley (1917- ) and John Eccles (1903- ) for the discovery of the chemical process-es responsible for the passage of impulses along individual nerve fibers. Hodgkin and Huxley's ionic theory of nerve impulses embodies principles applicable also to impulses of muscles, including those of the heart, that affect the electrocardiogram, a fact of great clinical importance.

Hodgkin was born on Feb. 5,1914, in Banbury, Oxfordshire, in central England (about 40 miles southeast of Birmingham). He attended the Downs School in Malvern (southeast of Birmingham) and the Greshams School in Holt (northeast boundary of Wales, about 60 miles northwest of Birmingham) before entering Trinity College, Cambridge University, in 1932. After graduating in 1936, he became a teaching fellow at the college. In 1937 and 1938, he worked at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) in New York City and at Woods Hole, near Falmouth, Massachusetts. He, along with Huxley, demonstrated conduction velocity effects in the nerve fibers of the shore crab.

In 1939, Hodgkin returned to Cambridge to collaborate with Huxley, one of his students at that time, on measuring the electrical and chemical behavior of individual nerve fibers. Efforts to explain these data were interrupted, however, by World War II ( 1939-1945). During that time, Hodgkin became scientific officer for radar research for the British Air Ministry and worked with the Ministry of Aircraft Production.

After the war, Hodgkin returned to Cambridge University; he resumed his investigation of nerve conduction and also taught at the Physiology Laboratory. In 1945, he and Huxley reported the results of their prewar research, which would earn the Nobel Prize for both of them. These results, some of which they obtained with Sir Bernard Katz (1911- ), indicated that the nerve membrane allows sodium ions to penetrate when the fiber is excited. This finding was incompatible with the conventional idea that electrical activity depended on the breakdown of the membranes. The action potential, but not the resting potential, was reduced by the external replacement of sodium chloride with choline chloride or with glucose. They showed that the action potential occurred because the membrane became highly permeable to sodium for a brief time, and, during that time, the potential was controlled by the concentration difference in sodium.

Hodgkin remained at Cambridge University as lecturer and associate director of research until 1952. He then became the Foulerton Research Professor of the Royal Society, a position he held until 1969.

In 1970, Hodgkin became the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Biophysics at Cambridge University, and he served in that position until 1981. From 1971 to 1984, he was Chancellor of the University of Leicester in Leicester, England (near Birmingham). He served as Master of Trinity College from 1978 to 1984, was president of the Marine Biological Association from 1966 to 1976, and was a member of the Medical Research Council from 1959 to 1963.

Besides the Nobel Prize, he received the Royal Medal ( 195 8) and the Copley Medal ( 1965) of the Royal Society as well as many honorary degrees. He was a member of numerous British and foreign scientific societies and was knighted in 1972.

Hodgkin was honored on a stamp issued by Niger in 1978 and one issued by Sweden in 1984.

Mayo Clin Proc 1994; 69:286 286 © 1994 Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research