Andrew Huxley interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 5th October and 7th November 2007

0:09:07 Born in Hampstead in 1917; grandson of T.H. Huxley, father married twice and I was youngest child of second marriage so never met him; never met my mother's father either; father's first wife was a niece of Matthew Arnold and granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, the founder of Rugby School; father, Leonard Huxley, was a literary man who died when I was fifteen; a friendly, gentle man; mother was good with her hands which I have inherited; she died aged one hundred and four; mother's family had a holiday house in the west of Scotland a few miles north of Oban where we went for holidays; still go to that area for holidays and walk; Aldous and Julian Huxley were step-brothers although more like uncles because of the difference in age; both came to our house and were entertaining company; Aldous had very poor eyesight and had been blind for a time and had learnt Braille; don't think Julian influenced my career as our science was different - he was interested in the behaviour of birds and really founded the science of animal behaviour but I have had little interest in this; T.H. Huxley wrote a short autobiography in which he said his boyhood ambition had been to become an engineer but he went into medicine because he had a brother-in-law in medicine; said that the only part of his course which interested him was physiology because it was the mechanical engineering of living things; this is an exact description of my interest in physiology; engineering is in the family; when I was a boy my interests were all mechanical and I had quite a lot of Meccano, and railway sets which my brother and I laid out each winter holiday; at fourteen our parents gave us a metal turning, screw cutting lathe which I still have; I had it in my lab when doing experimental work and made quite a lot of my own equipment; made quite a lot of improvements to the lathe such as putting scales on its movements etc.

14:15:03 First went to the junior branch of University College School which was in Holly Hill near Hampstead Heath; was at the senior branch for a year; father had been to same school when it was in Gower Street and so had my mother's father; moved to Westminster where I did classics for the first two years but my mother realized that my serious interests were in science and despite opposition from the Headmaster I was transferred to the science side; extremely well taught in physics by J.S. Rudwick whose son, Martin Rudwick, is a well known historian of science; there was a Mr Claridge who taught French but also took lessons at the home of the physician, Sir Thomas Lewis, and then privately, from the age of six; early introduction to language helped with other language learning such as German and Japanese; visited Japan for a conference in 1965 and have been since; learnt enough Japanese to give a lecture; also learnt to write a little and took lessons in Japanese at S.O.A.S. just out of interest; learnt to play the piano and as an undergraduate played chamber music with friends

28:10:21 At Westminster specialized in physics with a little biology; came to Cambridge with the aim of studying physics and becoming an engineer; in the Cambridge system had to take three different sciences in the first two years; took physics and chemistry and encouraged by Ben Delisle Burns, later best know for work on the cerebral cortex, to do physiology on the grounds that even in my first year I would be learning things that were still controversial; as I had come up with a major scholarship in physics my director of studies thought I did not need supervisions in physics and I mostly had supervisions from William Rushton; decided to specialize in physiology for part two; E.D. Adrian became head of the Physiology Department in 1937; he told me that if I wanted to make a career in physiology I should become medically qualified as at that time all teaching posts in physiology went to people with medical qualifications; registered as a medical student; had done enough physiology but had not done any anatomy; spent my third year doing anatomy with five dissections of the human body; did one dissection in the medical school at Barts with Andrew Barlow with whom I did part two physiology in 1939; in that final year I had supervisions with Alan Hodgkin which was how I first got to know him; he was four years older than me; that summer of 1939 he had arranged to go the Marine Biological Laboratory, Plymouth, to do experiments on the very large nerve fibre that squids have; description of and reason for importance; [cf. http://www.science.smith.edu/departments/NeuroSci/courses/bio330/squid.html]

subsequent work has been based on the dissection of single fibres from frogs and muscle fibres, partly from vertebrates but also from crabs and lobsters

43:35:22 Alan Hodgkin had learnt to isolate single nerve fibres from crabs; in 1937-38 he was in US and met K.C. Cole who was already doing experiments on the giant nerve fibre in squids which had been discovered by J.Z. Young; Hodgkin went to Plymouth and invited me to join him and between us we managed to get fibres set up so we could get an electrode down inside them (description); enabled us to record the impulse from the inside of the squid fibre without distortion; found to be much higher than expected; results published in a short note in 'Nature' in October 1939; we had no explanation for the result but speculated together during the war years on what the mechanism was and published a paper in the 'Journal of Physiology' in 1945 in which we put forward four possible explanations, all of which turned out to be wrong; in hindsight reminded of an observation by T.H. Huxley on first mastering the idea of the origin of species, "How stupid not to have thought of that"; the explanation for this overshoot was simple (description)

53:40:00 Had registered as a medical student and had done the necessary qualifying exam so the obvious thing was to get qualified; the Regis Professor of Physic and Cambridge was John Ryle; he ran an introductory clinical course at Addenbrookes for the first three months of the war; then I moved to University College and continued clinical training until teaching stopped because of bombing in June 1940; meanwhile, in Cambridge, introduced to Robert McCance and Elsie Widdowson, nutrionists who had produced the first calorie values of food before the war; wanted to conduct an experiment in rationing and I was recruited as a guinea pig; our meat ration was half of what we were eating during the war but bread and potatoes were not rationed; everything we ate weighed and so were we; New Year 1940, McCance took me and others to the Lake District to take vigorous exercise; stayed in George Trevelyan's house in Langdale, a step-cousin of mine; knew him well and got to know Sir Charles Trevelyan; his son, Geoffrey is one my closest friends