In 1962, John Carew Eccles was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, an award he shared with Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley for their research in the mechanisms of control and communication between nerve cells.

Born in Melbourne on January 27, 1903, Eccles received his early education from his parents, both of whom were teachers. As a medical student at Melbourne University, he won first-class honors and was also known as an a widely talented athlete in tennis, pole vaulting and cross-country running. Eccles' combined athletic and academic abilities won him a Rhodes Scholarship when he graduated in 1925, allowing him to study under Charles Scott Sherrington at Magdalen College, Oxford. There, he became one of Sherrington's research assistants and coauthored eight scientific papers with his superior. His Ph.D. thesis, accepted in 1929, dealt with excitation and inhibition in nerve cells. After receiving his doctorate, Eccles spent 1932-1934 at Exeter...