https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.91.7

The Right Honourable David Willetts MP, Minister for Universities and Science, performed the official opening of The Society’s new headquarters, Hodgkin Huxley House (HHH), at an evening reception on 21 May.

The Minister addressed an audience consisting of Society Trustees, committee members and award winners, as well as members of the Huxley, Hodgkin and Katz families. He said: “It’s a great honour to be here this evening for the opening of this great, new headquarters for The Physiological Society, named after the Nobel Prize winners Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley who won their Nobel Prize 50 years ago. There is a great history here, in British physiology, of winning Nobel Prizes, with Bernard Katz in 1970 and Robert Edwards in 2010.”

An exhibition of historical journals celebrated Hodgkin and Huxley, and also Bernard Katz, after whom the main auditorium is named. The Huxley family also kindly allowed The Society to display Sir Andrew’s Nobel medal.

Willetts described attending the 2010 Nobel Prize ceremony, a year of particular note for Britain, with resident academics winning four prizes. “We had Edwards in Medicine or Physiology, we had Christopher Pissarides in economics, and we had Geim and Novoselov in physics. It really was an annus mirabilis. And of course of those four, only one had been born in Britain. What that told me was that part of the greatness of our science and research activity here is that we provide an environment that attracts people from around the world.

“One of the reasons why it is such a great place to do science is the very rich network we have of learned societies and publications associated with them. The long history of your Society, and the happy links it has to academic publishing, are part of the wider ecosystem that makes Britain such a great scientific location.”