Huxley, Sir Andrew Fielding
Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley, 1917–2012, British physiologist, educated at University College, London; grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, half-brother of Sir Julian Huxley and Aldous Huxley. He finished his studies at Cambridge after doing operational research for the admiralty during World War II. He was director of studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1952 to 1960, when he became professor of physiology at University College, London. From 1984 to 1990 he was master of Trinity College. He also served as president of the Royal Society (1980–85). He and Sir Alan L. Hodgkin shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sir John Carew Eccles for analysis of the electrical and chemical events in nerve cell discharge. Huxley and Hodgkin explained how an electrical impulse traveled through a nerve cell; their work, which identified the mechanism as the movement of charged ions, also explained how anesthesia works.