Andrew Fielding Huxley was born in
Hampstead, London, on 22nd November 1917. His father, Leonard
Huxley, who was a son of the nineteenth - century scientist and
writer Thomas Huxley, was for a time a classics master at
Charterhouse School and later took up a literary career, writing
a number of biographies and being editor of the
«Cornhill» magazine. The children of his first marriage
included Sir Julian Huxley the biologist and Aldous Huxley the
writer. After his first wife's death, Andrew's father married
Rosalind Bruce, and Andrew is the youngest of the two sons of
this marriage. His father died in 1933.
Andrew was educated at University College School (1925-1930) and
Westminster School (1930-1935, King's Scholar); and went up to
Trinity
College, Cambridge in 1935 with a major entrance scholarship.
He had turned over to science from classics in 1932, and went to
Cambridge expecting that his career would be in the physical
sciences: he has always been mechanically minded, and he was
inspired at Westminster by the physics teaching of the late J. F.
Rudwick. He naturally took physics, chemistry and mathematics in
his Part I at Cambridge, but the rules required him to take
another science and he picked physiology, largely on the
recommendation of an old friend, B. Delisle Burns, now of the
Physiology Department, McGill University. Huxley found physiology
interesting, partly for its subject matter and partly through
contact with Adrian, Roughton,
Rushton, Hodgkin and the late G. A.
Millikan (all Fellows of Trinity) and others in the department,
and he decided to specialise in it. He spent 1937-1938 doing
anatomy with the intention of qualifying in medicine, and
1938-1939 doing the Part II course in physiology. In August 1939
Huxley joined Hodgkin at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Plymouth for
his first introduction to research, and they succeeded in
recording electrically from the inside of the squid giant
axon.
For the first year of the war Huxley was a clinical student, but
when medical teaching in London was stopped by air attacks, he
changed to work of more immediate application, and spent the rest
of the war on operational research in gunnery, first for
Anti-Aircraft Command and later for the Admiralty.
In 1941 Huxley was elected to a research fellowship at Trinity
College, Cambridge, and he took this up at the beginning of 1946
together with a teaching appointment in the Department of
Physiology. He continued to hold college and university posts in
Cambridge until 1960, when he became head of the Department of
Physiology at University College London. In 1969 he was appointed
to a Royal Society Research Professorship which he holds in the
Department of Physiology at University College London.
From 1946 to 1951 Huxley worked mostly in collaboration with
Hodgkin on nerve conduction, but also with R. Stämfli on
myelinated nerve fibres. In 1952 he turned to muscle contraction,
and developed an interference microscope for studying the
striation pattern in isolated muscle fibres. This has continued
to be his main line of work up to the present, though he has done
some further computations on the generation of the action
potential. Huxley has also developed a microtome for electron
microscope sections, and a micromanipulator.
Huxley was an Editor of the Journal of Physiology from
1950-1957, he has also been an Editor of the Journal of
Molecular Biology. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in
1955, and served on its Council, 1960-1962. He worked at Woods
Hole, Massachusetts, in 1953 as a Lalor Scholar; gave the Herter
Lectures at Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1959; and the Jesup
Lectures at Columbia University in 1964.
In 1947 Andrew Huxley married Jocelyn Richenda Gammell Pease,
daughter of M. S. Pease, a geneticist, and the Hon. H. B. Pease
(née Wedgwood). Mrs. Huxley is a Justice of the Peace, and
is active in a variety of public work in Cambridgeshire. They
have six children: Janet Rachel (born 20 April 1948), who read
Biochemistry at Bristol University; Stewart Leonard (born 19
December 1949), who read engineering at Cambridge University;
Camilla Rosalind (born 12 March 1952), who entered Cambridge
University in 1971; Eleanor Bruce (born 21 February 1959);
Henrietta Catherine (born 25 December 1960); and Clare Marjory
Pease (born 4 November 1962).
From Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1963-1970, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1972
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Sir Andrew Huxley died on 30 May 2012.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1963