Alan Hodgkin - Definition and Overview

Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin (February 5, 1914 - December 20, 1998) was a British physiologist and biophysicist, who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work with Andrew Fielding Huxley on the basis of nerve "action potentials," the electrical impulses that enable the activity of an organism to be coordinated by a central nervous system. Hodgkin and Huxley shared the prize that year with John Carew Eccles, who was cited for research on synapses. Hodgkin and Huxley's findings led the pair to hypothesize ion channels, which were confirmed only decades later.

The experimental measurements on which the pair based their action potential theory represent one of the earliest applications of a technique of electrophysiology known as the "voltage clamp". The second critical element of their research was the so-called giant axon of Atlantic squid (Loligo pealei), which enabled them to record ionic currents as they would not have been able to do in almost any other neuron, such cells being too small to study by the techniques of the time. The experiments took place at the University of Cambridge beginning in the 1930s and continuing into the 1940s, after interruption by World War II. The pair published their theory in 1952.

Confirmation of ion channels came with the development of the patch clamp, which led to a Nobel prize in 1991 to Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann.

External link

• Nobel biography of Hodgkin (http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1963/hodgkin-bio.html)

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