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Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley, OM , FRS (born 22 November 1917 , Hampstead , London ) is an English Physiologist and Biophysicist , who won the 1963 Nobel Prize In Physiology Or Medicine for his work with Alan Lloyd Hodgkin on the basis of nerve Action Potential s, 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 Synapse s. Hodgkin and Huxley's findings led the pair to hypothesize the existence of Ion Channel s, which were isolated only decades later. FAMILY Huxley is a son of the Writer and Editor Leonard Huxley by his second wife Rosalind Bruce, and hence half-brother of the Writer Aldous Huxley and fellow Biologist Julian Huxley and grandson of the biologist T. H. Huxley . In 1947 he married Jocelyn Richenda Gammell Pease ( 1925 - 2003 ), the daughter of the geneticist Michael Pease and his wife Helen Bowen Wedgwood, the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood . They had one son and five daughters:
Huxley was elected a member of the Royal Society Of London on 17 March 1955 . He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on 12 November 1974 . Sir Andrew was then appointed to the Order Of Merit on 11 November 1983 . NOBEL PRIZE The experimental measurements on which the pair based their action potential theory represent one of the earliest applications of a technique of . In 1969 he was appointed to a Royal Society Research Professorship which he holds in the Department of Physiology at University College London . He currently maintains his position as a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge , teaching in Physiology , Natural Sciences and Medicine . Sir Andrew is arguably the greatest mathematical biologist of the 20th Century. From his experimental work with Hodgkin, he developed a set of differential equations that provided a mathematical explanation for nerve impulses -- the "action potential". This work provided the foundation for the all of the current work on voltage-sensitive membrane channels, which are responsible for the functioning of animal nervous systems. Quite separately, he developed the mathematical equations for the operation of myosin "cross-bridges" that generate the sliding forces between actin and myosin filaments, which cause the contraction of skeletal muscles. These equations presented an entirely new paradigm for understanding muscle contraction, which has been extended to provide our understanding of almost all of the movements produced by cells above the level of bacteria. SEE ALSO REFERENCES
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