Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley shared the 1963 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with colleague Alan Lloyd Hodgkin for research which unlocked the secret of excitation and inhibition in nerve cells. Huxley theorized that the movement of sodium ions, and not just potassium ions, across the cell membrane was necessary to create an action potential. To test his hypothesis, in 1947, his colleagues Hodgkin and Bernard Katz manipulated the levels of sodium ions in the fluid outside the cell and discovered they could create or eliminate an action potential. This finding began the exciting road to discovering how neurons communicate.

Huxley was born in Hampstead, London. His father, Leonard Huxley, taught classics before becoming a writer, marrying Rosalind Bruce after his first wife died. Andrew, the youngest of their two sons, is half- brother to biologist Sir Julian Huxley and writer Aldous Huxley from his father's first marriage. His grandfather...