The Australian neurophysiologist Sir John Carew Eccles (1903-1997) made a series of original contributions to the knowledge of how nerve cells communicate with each other.

John Carew Eccles was born in Melbourne, Australia, on January 27, 1903, the first of two children of two teachers. He attended high school in Warambool, Victoria, but graduated in Melbourne in 1919. He went on to Melbourne University to study medicine, and excelled at multiple athletics. He married Irene Miller in 1928, with whom he would have nine children. When he graduated from college in 1925 at the top of his class, with a bachelor of science and medicine degrees, and as a Rhodes scholar, he realized his dream to attend Oxford University. There he worked with Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, probably the greatest student of the physiology of the nervous system in the 20th century. Eccles carried on and developed further his teacher's scientific and philosophical...