Alan Lloyd Hodgkin is best known for his work in defining the electrical and chemical characteristics of nerve impulses. Along with Andrew F. Huxley he performed experiments on the nerve fibers of squid and described the nerve impulses with a series of mathematical equations. For their research in this area, which resulted in the ionic theory of nerve impulses, the two men shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with John C. Eccles.

Hodgkin was born on February 5, 1914, in Banbury, Oxfordshire, England, to George L. and Mary Wilson Hodgkin. Hodgkin's father died in Baghdad during World War I, only a few years after his birth. Hodgkin was educated at the Downs School in Malvern and the Gresham School in Holt. In 1932, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he first became interested in physiology. Hodgkin became a fellow at Trinity in 1936, serving as lecturer and later as assistant...