Hodgkin was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, England, on February 5, 1914. His father died during World War I, leaving his mother to raise Alan and two younger children. After attending local schools in Malvern and Holt, Hodgkin entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1932. After graduation in 1936, he became a fellow of Trinity College.

While at Cambridge, Hodgkin came into contact with some of the world 's leading researchers in neurology, including Edgar D. Adrian and Archibald Vivian Hill. He soon became interested in the question of how nerve messages are transmitted. Due to the efforts of physiologists such as Julius Bernstein (1839-1917), scientists had known for more than a century that the transmission of nerve impulses is somehow correlated with small electrical currents in the body. Beginning in the late 1930s, Hodgkin pursued a line of research that allowed him to clarify the precise nature of this relationship. Some of Hodgkin's...