Hodgkin, Alan

A breakthrough in cell modelling occurred with the work of the British scientists. Sir Alan L. Hodgkin and Sir Andrew F. Huxley, for which they were in 1963 (jointly with Sir John C. Eccles) awarded the Nobel prize. Their new electrical models calculated the changes in membrane potential on the basis of the underlying ionic currents. 

Alan L. Hodgkin (1914—1998) and Andrew F. Huxley (1917- ), both English physiologists, first work out the mechanism of nerve-impulse transmission, showing that a sodium pump system works to carry impulses. 

Otto Loewi (Germany) (Nobel Prize, Medicine, 1936, chemical neurotransmission, acetylcholine) Sir John Eccles (Australia), Sir Alan Hodgkin (UK) Sir Andrew Huxley (UK) (Nobel prize, Medicine, 1963, neurotransmission, hyper- de-polarization)... 

Nerve impulses consist of a wave of transient membrane depolarisation/re-polarisation which traverses the nerve cell and is designated an action potential. As we saw in Chapter 9, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley demonstrated in 1952 that a microelectrode implanted into the giant axon (the long process emanating from the body of... 

In 1952, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley pubHshed a paper showing how a nonlinear empirical model of the membrane processes could be constructed [Hodgkin and Huxley, 1952]. In the five decades since their work, the Hodgkin-Huxley (abbreviated HH) paradigm of modeling cell membranes has been enormously successful. While the concept of ion channels was not estabhshed when they performed their work, one of their main contributions was the idea that ion-selective processes existed in the membrane. It is now known that most of the passive transport of ions across cell membranes is accompHshed by ion-selective channels. In addition to constructing a nonhnear model, they also estabhshed a method to incorporate experimental data into a nonlinear mathematical membrane model. 

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