Students of physiology or neuroscience will all recognise the names of Hodgkin and Huxley, particularly at Cambridge. Their achievements stand out as a high point in science.

Most will know about their experimental studies demonstrating how voltage-gated channels were involved in nerve impulses. Less widely recognised is their use of experimental data to develop a mathematical model explaining potential molecular mechanisms of impulses, and how influential this was. It’s very easy to forget that their work was undertaken with very basic electronics with semiconductors only being invented around the time they were working. Much of their equipment was hand-built, by themselves. There was very little information at the time about molecular structures or processes, the concept of a phospholipid bilayer cell membrane was only proposed a few years before they began working on squid giant axons. Data analysis depended upon hand-worked or hardware calculator-worked solutions without computers, yet they were using non-linear differential equations. A world war intervened in their research, taking them both away into military research, where their physics backgrounds enabled them to make substantial contributions, Hodgkin to the implementation of airborne microwave radar, Huxley to using radar to target anti-aircraft gunnery.

Hodgkin and Huxley also benefited from a very different academic world and research environment to today’s. Their work on giant squid required them being in Plymouth during the “squid season” (which took them away from undergraduate examinations). When their research resumed after the war they built their research case based on experimental studies done over a six year period before publishing the outcome as a series of 5 papers in the Journal of Physiology in 1952. This series of experiments culminated in the description of the voltage-dependent membrane conductances that underly the action potential. The papers combined description of application of a new scientific approach (voltage clamp) and identification of key properties of an underlying mechanism that must operate unseen at a molecular level. This was a huge achievement, deserving its description as groundbreaking. This was the impetus for their award of the Nobel Prize in 1963. Hodgkin and Huxley suggested that it “be regarded as a first approximation which needs to be refined and extended in many ways in the search for the actual mechanism”.

Both Hodgkin and Huxley went on to significant scientific achievements in their subsequent lives: Hodgkin moved on to work on the responses of photoreceptors to light, making a major contribution and Huxley moved to a chair at UCL, also moving field nerves to research on muscle force generation. where he developed the sliding filament hypothesis of striated muscle force generation. Both also took on major administrative and leadership roles, within universities, within the Royal Society and the Physiological Society. Both also became Masters of Trinity College Cambridge.

Hodgkin and Huxley were true giants of science of the order that rarely come along: they not only re-wrote the textbooks, they added an entirely new chapter.