Sir Alan HodgkinArticle Free Pass Sir Alan Hodgkin, in full Sir
Alan Lloyd Hodgkin (born February 5, 1914, Banbury, Oxfordshire,
England—died December 20, 1998, Cambridge), English physiologist
and biophysicist, who received (with Andrew Fielding Huxley and
Sir John Eccles) the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine
for the discovery of the chemical processes responsible for the
passage of impulses along individual nerve fibres. Hodgkin was
educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. After conducting radar
research (1939–45) for the British Air Ministry, he joined the
faculty at Cambridge, where he worked (1945–52) with Huxley on
measuring the electrical and chemical behaviour of individual
nerve fibres. By inserting microelectrodes into the giant nerve
fibres of the squid Loligo forbesi, they were able to show that
the electrical potential of a fibre during conduction of an
impulse exceeds the potential of the fibre at rest, contrary to
the accepted theory, which postulated a breakdown of the nerve
membrane