page_title: Alan Hodgkin
section_title: Pre-war research
hierarchical_section_title: Alan Hodgkin / Pre-war research
caption_attribution_description: This is a photo of listed building number 1331803.
context_page_description: Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin OM KBE PRS was an English physiologist and biophysicist, who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Huxley and John Eccles.
context_section_description: Hodgkin started conducting experiments on how electrical activity is transmitted in the sciatic nerve of frogs in July 1934. He found that a nerve impulse arriving at a cold or compression block, can decrease the electrical threshold beyond the block, suggesting that the impulse produces a spread of an electrotonic potential in the nerve beyond the block.
  In 1936, Hodgkin was invited by Herbert Gasser, then director of the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, to work in his laboratory during 1937–38. There he met Rafael Lorente de Nó and Kenneth Stewart Cole with whom he ended up publishing a paper. During that year he also spent time at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory where he was introduced to the squid giant axon, which ended up being the model system with which he conducted most of the research that eventually led to his Nobel Prize. 
  In spring 1938 he visited Joseph Erlanger at Washington University in St. Louis who told him he would take Hodgkin's local circuit theory of nerve impulse propagation seriously if he could show that altering the resistance of the fluid outside a nerve fibre made a difference to the velocity of nerve impulse conduction. Working with single nerve fibres from shore crabs and squids, he showed that the conduction rate was much faster in sea water than in oil, providing strong evidence for the local circuit theory.
  After his return to Cambridge he started collaborating with Andrew Huxley who had entered Trinity as a freshman in 1935, three years after Hodgkin. With a £300 equipment grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Hodgkin managed to set up a similar physiology setup to the one he had worked with at the Rockefeller Institute. He moved all his equipment to the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in July 1939. There, he and Huxley managed to insert a fine cannula into the giant axon of squids and record action potentials from inside the nerve fibre. They sent a short note of their success to Nature just before the outbreak of World War II.
caption: Trinity College at the University of Cambridge where Hodgkin was a student from 1932-1935, worked as a research fellow from 1936 on and finally served as Master from 1978-1984.
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