A brief historical perspective: Hodgkin and Huxley

Abstract

Working together in 1939, and again from 1946 to 1952, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley formed one of the most productive and influential collaborations in the history of physiology. Their work, both in the Physiological Laboratory in Cambridge and at the Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, provided fundamental insights into nerve cell excitability. Their legacy is not only our understanding of how voltage-gated ion channels give rise to propagating action potentials, but also the very framework for studying and analysing ion channel kinetics. Their work won them a share of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (Fig. 1) as well as laying the foundations for other Nobel Prize-winning work including that of Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann ‘for their discoveries concerning the function of single ion channels in cells’ and Roderick MacKinnon ‘for structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels’. Figure 1 The cover of the 1963 Nobel Prize Programme