Wartenweiler Memorial Lecture: Andrew Huxley - XVII ISB Congress in Calgary, part 1/3

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Sir Andrew Huxley Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963 Wartenweiler Memorial Lecture: Andrew Huxley ISB 1999 Congress XVII - Calgary, Canada part 1/3 The record of this Huxley's lecture is a contribution by Prof. Walter Herzog (University of Calgary). This lecture, presented here in 3 parts, was delivered during the opening lecture of the Congress of the International Society of Biomechanics 1999 in Calgary, Canada. We would like to thank prof. Herzog for this contribution to the Neuromech TV. Video includes an introduction, by Prof. Walter Herzog, to the topic of talk. Hope all of you enjoy this historic talk! About the speaker: Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley (22 November 1917 – 30 May 2012) was a Nobel Prize-winning English physiologist and biophysicist. He was born into the prominent Huxley family. After graduating from Westminster School in Central London, from where he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, he joined Alan Lloyd Hodgkin to study nerve impulses. Their eventual discovery of the basis for propagation of nerve impulses (called an action potential) earned them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963. They made their discovery from the giant axon of the Atlantic squid. Soon after the outbreak of the Second World War, Huxley was recruited by the British Anti-Aircraft Command and later transferred to the Admiralty. After the war he resumed research at The University of Cambridge, where he developed interference microscopy that would be suitable for studying muscle fibres. In 1952 he was joined by a German physiologist Rolf Niedergerke. Together they discovered in 1954 the mechanism of muscle contraction, popularly called the "sliding filament theory", which is the foundation of our modern understanding of muscle mechanics. In 1960 he became head of the Department of Physiology at University College London. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1955, and President in 1980. The Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal in 1973 for his collective contributions to the understanding of nerve impulses and muscle contraction. He was conferred a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974, and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1983. He was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, until his death.