Andrew Fielding Huxley (19172012)

Andrew Fielding Huxley, OM 1983; Kt 1974; FRS 1955; PRS 1980–1985, MA, Hon. ScD Cantab. Physiologist and Biophysicist. Born Hampstead, London, 22 November 1917. Demonstrator, 1946–50, Assistant Director of Research, 1951–59, and Reader in Experimental Biophysics, 1959–60, Physiological Laboratory, Cambridge; Director of Studies, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1952–60; Jodrell Professor 1960–69, Royal Society Research Professor, 1969–83, University College London. Master, 1984–90, Fellow, 1941–60 and since 1990, Trinity College, Cambridge (Hon. Fellow, 1967–90). Died 30 May 2012, aged 94. Sir Andrew Huxley, shown in his laboratory in Fig. 1, was a giant among modern physiologists, pioneering the fields of nerve conduction, and skeletal muscle activation and tension generation. He worked with exceptional and elegant originality and had a characteristically quantitative approach to physiological analysis within a physically rigorous framework, an approach now beginning to permeate from physiology and biophysics into their cognate biological and biomedical sciences. He was born in Hampstead, London, to the writer Leonard Huxley and Rosalind Bruce in 1917, within an illustrious family. His grandfather Thomas Huxley was a distinguished 19th-century biologist and early proponent of evolutionary theory. Julian Huxley, a pioneer in animal behaviour, and Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World among other works, were half-brothers from his father’s first marriage. He was educated at University College (1925–30) andWestminster Schools (1930–5), where he was inspired by J. F. Rudwick’s teaching to turn from Classics to physical sciences. He chose to apply to Trinity College, Cambridge, through his family’s friendship with George Trevelyan, where he won amajor Entrance Scholarship (1935). His interests eventually turned to Physiology through his contact with Delisle Burns, and then with E. D. Adrian, Jack Roughton,William Rushton, Alan Hodgkin and Glenn Millikan amongst others. To this end his studies proceeded along a medical direction pursuing Anatomy in 1937–8 and Physiology in Part II of the Natural Sciences Tripos in Cambridge in 1938–39. His first introduction to physiological experimental work began when he joined Alan Hodgkin, who had previously tutored him in Trinity, at the Plymouth Marine Biological Laboratory in 1939. They succeeded in making electrophysiological recordings from the inside of the squid giant axon, whose structure was first demonstrated by Young (1936), of the time course of its actionpotential, demonstrating its overshoot for the first time (Hodgkin & Huxley, 1939, 1945). For the first year of the Second World War, Huxley was a clinical student in London. However, when medical teaching was stopped by air attacks, he turned to operational research in gunnery, first for the British Anti-Aircraft