Physiology News Magazine
Q&A: Remembering Sir Andrew Huxley
Sir Andrew Huxley, ‘the most eminent physiologist of a generation’, passed away in May this year. We asked some Members who knew him to share some of their memories of the man who unravelled the propagation of the action potential and unveiled the sliding filament mechanism in striated muscle.
Features
Q&A: Remembering Sir Andrew Huxley
Sir Andrew Huxley, ‘the most eminent physiologist of a generation’, passed away in May this year. We asked some Members who knew him to share some of their memories of the man who unravelled the propagation of the action potential and unveiled the sliding filament mechanism in striated muscle.
Features
Virginia Huxley
Professor of Medical Pharmacology and Physiology, University of Missouri-Columbia Medical School
Bob Simmons
Emeritus Professor of Biophysics, King’s College London
Martin McDonagh
Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Birmingham
Yale Goldman
Professor of Physiology, University of Pennsylvania
Mike Collis
Physiology News Editor
David Trentham
Honorary Professor, The Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics, King’s College London
Jonathan Coles
Research Associate (Infection Immunity and Inflammation Medicine), Institute of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation, University of Glasgow
Ann Silver
Physiological Laboratory, Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.88.37
Virginia Huxley, Professor of Medical Pharmacology and Physiology, University of Missouri-Columbia Medical School
How close were you to your uncle, Sir Andrew Huxley?
The first time I recall meeting Uncle Andrew was when he took his family on a tour of the States after he got the Nobel. He was a very out-going person who was able to engage with children. Shall we say that was in stark contrast with his older brother, my father [David Huxley]. They were close as children, but they diverged at about university time. After the War, he and my mother ended up in Bermuda, where Daddy was attorney general, then solicitor general, and then acting governor. What’s sad is that my father always felt he was a failure by comparison to Uncle Andrew. It’s like, good grief, Daddy!
My mother was American and she thought that it was a lot of stress on the children to grow up with the Huxley moniker. So she decided to remove us from that as much as possible.
We started to have more contact with Uncle Andrew (1963 with my eldest sister’s wedding and we came over to the UK) because two of my sisters ended up in England. One married a Darwin and the other married another Huxley!
Was he helpful in your career?
If Uncle Andrew was following my career, I wasn’t aware of it back then (as a student). But he was one of those people who could scare the bejesus out of you because he just absorbed everything that was going on around him.
I gave my father a copy of my [PhD] dissertation – a study on oxygen diffusion boundary layers (in fact, it was my first paper in The Journal of Physiology!). I was in this programme that I thought was original and that no one else was doing, called ‘biophysics’ (at the University of Virginia). So the dissertation was in the library in the house my father retired to – which was actually where my grandmother was living, so Andrew was over there quite frequently. Apparently he just picked it up and removed it. And I know this because I received a four-page, carefully penned critique of it. I was totally floored, because his reading of my dissertation was, frankly, better than anything that any of my dissertation committee members had done.
That’s when it really struck me that he wasn’t just a neurophysiologist or a muscle physiologist, but that, well, yes, he’s sort of considered to be one of the founders of biophysics! This area that I had thought was pristine! After I’d begun to put two and two together, I went and did a critical read of, well, most of his papers. All I could do was just laugh because I realised that I had backed right into it. Where I was intellectually comfortable were areas that he had already ploughed. For me the science is the intellectual pursuit and the joy of that. What I realised in looking at his work is that’s exactly what the driver was for him.
He always stood to the side. But I realise that he also took interest in what I was doing. In ’87 he and Aunt Richenda came out to Columbia and spent some time here with me. What was great was he was now visiting my lab and my setup. What I study is exchange in the microvasculature, and I do a number of studies that are in vivo – from a biophysicist standpoint – I try to control the various components. And it’s the old problem of how do you study a living system without disturbing this system just by studying it. So we’ve developed a number of techniques that really are not standard to try to do this. We had a great day with him in the lab on his hands and knees under my microscope rigs. It was hysterical: I kept thinking, “There’s Sir Andrew Huxley, crawling on the floor, having a great day!”
I realised that most people either wouldn’t have that conversation with Sir Andrew, because they’d think he was looking for something else or that he was going to ask some penetrating question that was going to kill them, or God knows what. In his quiet, he could be intimidating.
My first presentation to The Physiological Society was actually at St Thomas’. A December meeting. I was talking on some work that I was doing as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California. In the audience was Uncle Andrew. At that point he was President of the Royal Society. At that point he wore half-glasses that would go about mid-way down the bridge of his nose, and he and my father both had eyebrows that you could land a pigeon on! When they would look up at you, over the half-glasses and under the eyebrows, you felt as if you were being seared with laser light. I have never been so goddamn nervous in my entire existence! Knowing that it was going to be voted on and that stuff, and that they were scrutinising ‘Sir Andrew’s niece’, and thinking “Thank you, Mummy, that I wasn’t brought up with this!” The relief was incredible when it was accepted.
That evening at dinner, Andrew asked if I would join him at high table, and at the end of the evening – these are tiny little things, but huge – Uncle Andrew said would I like it if he found me a cab, and I said “That would be lovely!” So he hailed a cab and as I‘m getting in he said, “Should you like to become a Member of The Society, I’d be pleased to put you forward,” as he shut the door.
I almost fainted. It wasn’t “You did a good job, I’m proud of you,” it was “I wouldn’t be embarrassed to put you forward as a Member”.
Mind you, the next time I gave a talk, the talk finishes and “Are there any questions?” Uncle Andrew pipes up and asks this question. This is where an American upbringing can get you into trouble; I hear myself saying “Uncle Andrew, you asked me that question a few years ago and the answer remains the same.” And a part of my brain is going, “Jesus Christ! What are you doing?!” There was this audible gasp from the audience. I thought I was going to just die! As I raised my head up I realised he was just grinning! I mean, again, everybody else would have had to have turned and looked to see what I saw, but they were just appalled at this brash American! And I realised that I was slipping into a familiarity, like,
“Oops!”
What personal qualities led to his achievements and great standing?
Part of it was the powers of observation and the other one – which I think is disappearing from science – the power of sitting back and watching and thinking about things.
Another one is how to be intuitive and follow through on that. It’s almost like everybody at the moment wants things to be formulaic: A leads to B leads to C. The thing that’s so beautiful about physiology is that it’s not linear. To solve the problem you have to allow your brain to take some unusual steps. The power that he had, was he could do that and then back-fill. He could then lead people from A to B to C. He took the time to observe it, think about it, figure out how to test it. It’s like, guys, get back to joy of the science!
Is there something about him that people may not know?
He only made it 94.5% of the way to his age goal! Granny lived to 104. His target was just to be a centenarian.
Bob Simmons
Emeritus Professor of Biophysics, King’s College London
‘Prof’, as I knew him, was about 50 when I became a postdoctoral fellow in his laboratory at UCL in 1968. I found him, in all senses of the word, awesome. He seemed to know everything and to be able to do anything and in spades: applied mathematics, physics, engineering, material science, electronics, mechanical skills, an encyclopaedic knowledge of quantitative physiology, great insight, great intuition.
He was human though. I noticed a few endearing pet hates: transistors (“I gave up designing circuits when valves went out”), biophysics as a subject (“It’s just the interesting bits of physiology”), statistics (“It’s only a bad experiment that needs statistics”), and there was a certain reserve about chemistry and computers. There was a diffidence about protein structure and I think his intuition failed him here. He hated the phrase ‘conformational change’, saying of the word ‘conformational’ that it had the same import as ‘bloody’; all it signified now was that a noun would follow.
He was very much a modeller; he would think of the simplest model that would make a biological phenomenon tractable, sometimes rather Meccano-like, and then work it out mathematically. He often said that in biological models the difficulty wasn’t the mathematics, it was formulating the question. He was an extraordinary problem-solver; whenever we hit a non-trivial technical difficulty he would just stand there and think, sometimes for half an hour, until the solution came; only rarely would he say, “I need to do this on a piece of paper.” I often wondered whether he was writing on his mind, as it were, or if he was summoning up some supra-sensory occult power. I didn’t like to ask.
He was in some ways a hard task master. I can’t remember him ever explaining anything to me, like a mathematical derivation or an idea, in any detail. He expected you to work things out for yourself, get up to speed, and only then would he discuss the problem, and on equal terms. You came to expect robust criticism and, if it came to an argument, he was brilliant and forceful. It was hard to win even when you knew he was wrong. But, in spite of all that brilliance, when I think of him now, what I chiefly remember is how kind he was.
Martin McDonagh
Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Birmingham
I was a MSc student at UCL in the mid 1970s and I had gone into the Kardoma coffee bar on Tottenham Court Road for a bite to eat. To my astonishment, there, alone with a cup of coffee, sat Andrew Huxley, Nobel Laureate and Royal Society Professor. We had just had a series of lectures from him on the action potential, so I summoned up my courage and introduced myself. I was surprised to find him very affable and so I talked to him about the project I was struggling with at the time. He was full of good suggestions and I was so intoxicated by the encounter that I left the Kardoma without paying, only to be pursued by the waiter.
“I thought I should have to pay for you and collect it from you in the morning!” he joked in a most friendly manner. With a hot face, I paid up and made a fast exit.
Huxley was held in great awe in the department and even some senior professors were frightened to speak to him. “He relaxes by reading Russian scientific papers – in the original Russian,” was one of the departmental jests. You can therefore imagine why consternation greeted me when I arrived late at the lab the next morning.
“Where on earth have you been? Professor Huxley has been asking for you! Go up to his office at once!”
I think the lab thought I must at least have murdered somebody to receive such a summons from Olympus! I climbed the staircase with much trepidation and gingerly knocked on his door.
“Come in, come in! I’ve been thinking about your project and I have asked a chap from the Hammersmith to contact you. He is doing something rather similar and should be able to help you.”
From that day on he always had a friendly word for me in the corridor and my fellow postgraduates just could not understand what special magic power I had to be on such friendly terms with Zeus. Of course, the Hammersmith contact did get in touch – and quickly!
Thereafter, at Society meetings, Professor Huxley vaguely or clearly remembered me – I could never discern which. However, much later when I had my own postgraduate, ‘the Kardoma incident’ ensured that I had no fears about suggesting that he should speak to Huxley about problems with his apparatus and later about post-doctorate opportunities in the USA.
Yale Goldman
Professor of Physiology, University of Pennsylvania
How did you come to know Sir Andrew?
I did a post-doctoral fellowship under Bob Simmons in London, in Huxley’s lab at the UCL, from Fall ‘75 to the beginning of 1980.
Yes, I was intimidated by coming to work in his lab. I wouldn’t say everyone would call him approachable, but I got along with him quite well. He was very nice to me and very interested in my science. I think he liked talking to me, so he made it easier for me.
What was he like to work with?
Around the winter holidays at the end of 1980, I had built this new way of looking at muscle fibre striations using white light optical diffraction. This is something that had come up in conversation with Huxley while I was in London. So I was building this setup in Philadelphia that he had helped to suggest and design. He was going to come and visit just after the holiday, in January. I basically just lived in that lab through the winter vacation, trying to get it ready so I could show Prof Huxley that the idea worked. We did get it working well enough to demonstrate the principle, but there was something in the optics that was confusing me horribly. It had to do with beams of light coming through the muscle fibre. At one point it got very blurry. I knew a bit of optics myself, but still I couldn’t figure out why it was getting blurry at that one point. I was trying everything. It wasn’t a matter of focus or positioning or things like that.
So, Huxley came and we showed him that the thing worked, which was great. Then I said, “Prof, do you have any idea about this bit here where it’s going blurry?”
He stared at it a little while. He took a filter paper and put it in the beam so he could see what was happening with the optics. He thought about it for a second. Then he took this one lens – a big aspherical lens, two inches in diameter – and he pulled it out of the set-up and he flipped it around 180 degrees, so that the light was going through it in the other direction.
That fixed it! He figured out, just from his short interaction with this thing, that I had the light going through the lens in the wrong direction. That’s not something that you usually think about. There and then he fixed the problem I’d been fretting over all that time!
What personal qualities led to his achievements and great standing?
He was fascinated with all sorts of science, and was so knowledgeable about all kinds of topics that you could engage him on practically any scientific or social issue. His overall range of knowledge was amazing. He had opinions on all of it. It was really fascinating to talk to him.
What might people not know about Sir Andrew?
I remember him talking about what happened during World War II when he was in the military. He told my wife and I – he was talking about just a few days before the invasion of Normandy – that for some reason they went on a boat and they crossed the channel and were walking around on the beaches in France. I don’t know if you’d call it spying, but certainly looking over the situation.
It was, of course, occupied by Germany at the time. I asked, “Wasn’t it dangerous?!”
He said, “No!… Well, yes, maybe it was, but anyway, we were there!” He just had this very calm attitude towards the whole thing. Perhaps the details, such as the timing, have become distorted.
I don’t remember him ever bringing the subject up except that one time.
Mike Collis
Physiology News Editor
In November of 2007 I organised a dinner in London for Sir Andrew Huxley to celebrate his 90th birthday. Other guests included the executive committee of The Society and past presidents Denis Noble, Colin Blakemore and Dafydd Walters. A very good dinner was enjoyed by all. But before the cheese was served, Sir Andrew said he must leave as he wanted to be in good form for the symposium that was being held in his honour at UCL the following day.
I escorted him downstairs from the dining room and called a taxi to take him to The Royal Society, where he was staying that night.
“Would you like me to accompany you in the taxi?” I enquired.
“No, no, not necessary,” he replied, “I can find my own way.”
I returned to the dining room and enjoyed the rest of the meal and settled the bill. The rest of the guests were preparing to leave, but Colin Blakemore couldn’t find his coat. A similar coat was found, but it belonged to Sir Andrew, not to Colin. Sir Andrew must have picked up the wrong coat!
A quick inspection of the coat revealed a return ticket to Cambridge and a book. Ian McGrath volunteered to call into The Royal Society the next day to exchange the coats and the party broke up in good spirits.
The following morning I arrived at The Society office as usual, only to receive a phone call from a worried Ian McGrath. Sir Andrew had not been seen at The Royal Society. My heart sank – what had happened? And was I responsible for losing the most eminent physiologist of a generation?
Before contacting the police or the hospitals, I phoned Carol Huxley – his daughter-in-law in The Society publications office in Cambridge. “Carol, I don`t want to worry you, but Sir Andrew didn’t arrive at The Royal Society last night and we don`t know where he is!”
“Oh, don’t worry,” replied Carol “He is on the train back to London to attend the symposium at the UCL. And by the way, he said he wants his coat back!”
David Trentham
Honorary Professor, The Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics, King’s College London
I first met Sir Andrew in 1972, as a young independent investigator, at the 37th Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology. A question from Andrew followed my talk. When just about ready to respond, Annemarie Weber, already distinguished for her discovery of the role of calcium in muscle, leant across to Bob Davies and whispered “The hounds have got him!”
So began my first exchange with Andrew. Afterwards we had a conversation that had enormous impact on my whole thinking about the role and mechanism of the myosin ATPase.
I was privileged over the next three years that my papers to the Biochemical Journal, with Clive Bagshaw, were read by Andrew and by Hugh Huxley prior to submission for publication. Their comments and insights, especially from a broader perspective, were invaluable.
My principal opportunities for meeting Andrew in the years that followed were at scientific conferences, especially the triennial Gordon Conference and Alpach meetings on muscle. For 20 years through the seventies and eighties, the climax of these conferences was the summary session on the last day when Andrew put into perspective all that we had learnt at the conference and what was new.
In his later years I was able to visit Andrew occasionally in his lovely home in Grantchester to be greeted with warm hospitality by him and his eldest daughter, Janet. Often, Scottish pancakes with raspberry jam were served, reflecting perhaps his love of Scotland’s west coast.
One of his last major meetings was the celebration of his 90th birthday at University College London. It was a memorable occasion in which respect and affection for Andrew were so much in abundance.
Jonathan Coles
Research Associate (Infection Immunity and Inflammation Medicine), Institute of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation, University of Glasgow
Andrew Huxley was notable for his relentless scientific enquiry, his conscientiousness, his courtesy and his great generosity. My contact with him was mainly confined to 1967-1971 (he supervised a long, drawn-out MSc project), but the memories are vivid. He very generously let me use his personal lathe, his personal microscope, and a Cooke objective that he had had modified so that the front surface was concave spherical and it could be immersed in a medium of any refractive index.
At one point, he suddenly had the idea that an aperture from an electron microscope might be useful for the optical system. He did not wait until the next time he saw his young student to suggest that he look for one, instead, he went to the microscope room on an upper floor – presumably bounding up the old wooden staircase – got a couple, came down, burst into my lab and presented them to me with the modest suggestion that they might be worth trying.
Ann Silver
Physiological Laboratory, Cambridge
Many people will have thoughts about Andrew that extend beyond his enormous contribution to physiology. I, for one, will always remember the alarming way he used to come down the stairs in the Cambridge Physiological Laboratory two at a time – a characteristic he exhibited well into old age.
Andrew was one of the minority of Fellows of The Royal Society who were active in supporting animal experiments. While Andrew was, by his own admission, quite shy, Richenda, his wife, was not. At the 1993 IUPS Meeting in Glasgow she wore a t-shirt emblazoned across the chest with ‘I support Animal Experiments’. Many others chose to display the same wording on a small metal badge, but that made far less impact!
At Andrew’s Funeral Service in Trinity College, Cambridge, in June this year, his son, Stewart, recalled energetic family holidays on the west coast of Scotland. He also mentioned Andrew’s early War work (before he became involved in operational research in gunnery) when he was part of a small group who, laden with heavy rucksacks, walked for miles every day assessing nutritional requirements. Perhaps these experiences contributed to his stamina.
Visit www.physoc.org/sir-andrew-huxley for more memories, photos and video of Sir Andrew Huxley.