Andrew Huxley interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 5th October and 7th November 2007

0:09:07 Born in Hampstead in 1917; grandson of T.H. Huxley, father married twice and I was youngest child of second marriage so never met him; never met my mother's father either; father's first wife was a niece of Matthew Arnold and granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, the founder of Rugby School; father, Leonard Huxley, was a literary man who died when I was fifteen; a friendly, gentle man; mother was good with her hands which I have inherited; she died aged one hundred and four; mother's family had a holiday house in the west of Scotland a few miles north of Oban where we went for holidays; still go to that area for holidays and walk; Aldous and Julian Huxley were step-brothers although more like uncles because of the difference in age; both came to our house and were entertaining company; Aldous had very poor eyesight and had been blind for a time and had learnt Braille; don't think Julian influenced my career as our science was different - he was interested in the behaviour of birds and really founded the science of animal behaviour but I have had little interest in this; T.H. Huxley wrote a short autobiography in which he said his boyhood ambition had been to become an engineer but he went into medicine because he had a brother-in-law in medicine; said that the only part of his course which interested him was physiology because it was the mechanical engineering of living things; this is an exact description of my interest in physiology; engineering is in the family; when I was a boy my interests were all mechanical and I had quite a lot of Meccano, and railway sets which my brother and I laid out each winter holiday; at fourteen our parents gave us a metal turning, screw cutting lathe which I still have; I had it in my lab when doing experimental work and made quite a lot of my own equipment; made quite a lot of improvements to the lathe such as putting scales on its movements etc.

14:15:03 First went to the junior branch of University College School which was in Holly Hill near Hampstead Heath; was at the senior branch for a year; father had been to same school when it was in Gower Street and so had my mother's father; moved to Westminster where I did classics for the first two years but my mother realized that my serious interests were in science and despite opposition from the Headmaster I was transferred to the science side; extremely well taught in physics by J.S. Rudwick whose son, Martin Rudwick, is a well known historian of science; there was a Mr Claridge who taught French but also took lessons at the home of the physician, Sir Thomas Lewis, and then privately, from the age of six; early introduction to language helped with other language learning such as German and Japanese; visited Japan for a conference in 1965 and have been since; learnt enough Japanese to give a lecture; also learnt to write a little and took lessons in Japanese at S.O.A.S. just out of interest; learnt to play the piano and as an undergraduate played chamber music with friends

28:10:21 At Westminster specialized in physics with a little biology; came to Cambridge with the aim of studying physics and becoming an engineer; in the Cambridge system had to take three different sciences in the first two years; took physics and chemistry and encouraged by Ben Delisle Burns, later best know for work on the cerebral cortex, to do physiology on the grounds that even in my first year I would be learning things that were still controversial; as I had come up with a major scholarship in physics my director of studies thought I did not need supervisions in physics and I mostly had supervisions from William Rushton; decided to specialize in physiology for part two; E.D. Adrian became head of the Physiology Department in 1937; he told me that if I wanted to make a career in physiology I should become medically qualified as at that time all teaching posts in physiology went to people with medical qualifications; registered as a medical student; had done enough physiology but had not done any anatomy; spent my third year doing anatomy with five dissections of the human body; did one dissection in the medical school at Barts with Andrew Barlow with whom I did part two physiology in 1939; in that final year I had supervisions with Alan Hodgkin which was how I first got to know him; he was four years older than me; that summer of 1939 he had arranged to go the Marine Biological Laboratory, Plymouth, to do experiments on the very large nerve fibre that squids have; description of and reason for importance; [cf. http://www.science.smith.edu/departments/NeuroSci/courses/bio330/squid.html]
subsequent work has been based on the dissection of single fibres from frogs and muscle fibres, partly from vertebrates but also from crabs and lobsters

43:35:22 Alan Hodgkin had learnt to isolate single nerve fibres from crabs; in 1937-38 he was in US and met K.C. Cole who was already doing experiments on the giant nerve fibre in squids which had been discovered by J.Z. Young; Hodgkin went to Plymouth and invited me to join him and between us we managed to get fibres set up so we could get an electrode down inside them (description); enabled us to record the impulse from the inside of the squid fibre without distortion; found to be much higher than expected; results published in a short note in 'Nature' in October 1939; we had no explanation for the result but speculated together during the war years on what the mechanism was and published a paper in the 'Journal of Physiology' in 1945 in which we put forward four possible explanations, all of which turned out to be wrong; in hindsight reminded of an observation by T.H. Huxley on first mastering the idea of the origin of species, "How stupid not to have thought of that"; the explanation for this overshoot was simple (description)

53:40:00 Had registered as a medical student and had done the necessary qualifying exam so the obvious thing was to get qualified; the Regis Professor of Physic and Cambridge was John Ryle; he ran an introductory clinical course at Addenbrookes for the first three months of the war; then I moved to University College and continued clinical training until teaching stopped because of bombing in June 1940; meanwhile, in Cambridge, introduced to Robert McCance and Elsie Widdowson, nutrionists who had produced the first calorie values of food before the war; wanted to conduct an experiment in rationing and I was recruited as a guinea pig; our meat ration was half of what we were eating during the war but bread and potatoes were not rationed; everything we ate weighed and so were we; New Year 1940, McCance took me and others to the Lake District to take vigorous exercise; stayed in George Trevelyan's house in Langdale, a step-cousin of mine; knew him well and got to know Sir Charles Trevelyan; his son, Geoffrey is one my closest friends

Continuation 7th November 2007

0:09:07 Bernard Katz, with whom Alan Hodgkin worked, came to join A.V Hill at University College in about 1930 and had then gone to Australia just before the war on a research fellowship; gave a lecture in 1940 with suggestion on the possible reason for the overshoot; after the lecture he had forgotten that he said it; I had a similar experience of having given a plausible explanation to someone at a party but could not remember what it was; the only plausible explanation was the membrane becoming permeable to sodium ions and it looks as though Katz and I both had the right idea but had somehow repressed it; I got engaged and in 1946 the Marine Laboratory at Plymouth was out of action because it had been bombed during the war but in 1947 Hodgkin and Katz went there and did some preliminary experiments; continued into 1948 and I would have joined them but I was married that summer and was on my honeymoon; however they showed that at the peak of the electric change during an impulse the membrane became highly permeable to sodium; this idea became universally accepted

3:24:10 Two of my undergraduate friends were members of the Barlow family and direct descendants of Charles Darwin; they had a big house at Wendover and had a dance every year; at one of these at New Year 1946 that I met my future wife; she was then a second year undergraduate at Newnham and we became engaged that summer; put off marrying until she got her degree so we married in the summer of 1948; she died in 2003 and we had a very happy married life; she was never directly involved in my work although she had taken physiology in part one of the natural science tripos, but she had many other interest; when we were engaged she said she wanted to have six children as she was one of six; didn't take her seriously but we did have six children and they occupied a substantial part of her life; she was also involved in a lot of village activities and charities, also was a magistrate; we had separate activities but was a good social entertainer when I was Master of Trinity; her name was Richenda, her ancestors were Quakers, but her grandfather, Edward Reynold Pease, was a firm atheist and so was her father; she and I were both agnostic (a word invented by my grandfather); I am very conscious that there is no scientific explanation for the fact that we are "conscious"; found no difficulty in officiating in chapel as Master, indeed prevented a fire when not concentrating on the sermon on one occasion; brief history of Trinity Chapel

10:45:17 Was Master of Trinity for six years, following Alan Hodgkin; enjoyed the experience; the duties of the Master of Trinity is less than in most colleges as it is a Crown appointment so the fellows have no control over whom they get; they give the Master minimal power although chairs the weekly college council; duties mostly ceremonial with a lot of entertaining and being entertained; wealth of Trinity stemmed from a benefactor in the early twentieth century; made a lot of money out of the development of Felixstowe container port; Senior Bursar had bought quite a bit of land inland from Felixstowe in about 1930, thinking it would become valuable for housing development; docks were developed by the next Senior Bursar, John Bradfield, and it became immensely valuable; another thing that made a lot of money was the Cambridge Science Park which was the first in Britain, built on land which had been college land before the foundation of Trinity in 1547; formed by combining two much older colleges, King's Hall and Michaelhouse; income is much more than the college actually needs and a large part of it goes to providing bursaries to impecunious pupils at any college in Cambridge, among other things

17:09:11 At the time of marriage had been a research fellow of Trinity since 1941; normally applicants for research fellowships had to put in a full length dissertation but this was relaxed because of the war and I was awarded a fellowship on the strength of one and a half pages on the observations made by Hodgkin and I; after the war was made a demonstrator; have always had an interest in microscopes and demonstrated in the histology classes in the department of physiology; after this became an assistant director of research and my junior research fellowship at Trinity continued after the war; got a senior research fellowship and then a lectureship at Trinity; in 1960 more or less offered the post of Professor of Physiology at University College where A.V. Hill was then working in retirement; he wrote to me saying that he hoped I would accept as he had been in a similar situation in 1919 - he had come back to Cambridge after the war and was comfortably established with a university post and a college fellowship when he was offered the chair of physiology at Manchester; Lord Rutherford had just come back from Manchester to Cambridge and Hill asked his advice; he quoted this advice to me and had never regretted it: "Cambridge is a splendid place when you are young and Cambridge is a splendid place when you are old, but for the middle of your life, for God's sake, get out"; followed his example and took the chair in London; I was told that London University had a rule that its professors should live within thirty miles; said I intended to stay living in this house which was accepted as I had a London address; habit was to go to London early on Monday morning, stay Monday and Tuesday nights, home for Wednesday night, back to London Thursday morning and home late Friday for the weekend; did not have a flat in London but used bed and breakfast places close to University College so stayed working until nearly midnight and was back at work before nine the following morning, so probably spent more hours in the department than anyone else

23:24:12 After giving up the Chair the Royal Society gave me a research professorship (in 1969) which provided a salary and research expenses and the cost of a technician and a secretary; held this until I reached retiring age in 1983; I then carried on without a salary until I became Master in 1984; with the Royal Society appointment continued my research at University College; in 1963 got the Nobel Prize with Alan Hodgkin for the work on squid; we shared prize with Sir John Eccles whose work, though different, was concerned with ionic movements through nerve cell membranes; in retrospect I am sorry that Cole had not shared it with us as our work, to some extent, did depend on his remarkable technical achievement; events surrounding the Prize are very enjoyable; put up in the Grand Hotel in Stockholm and took our three elder children; got to know two of the senior people in physiology in Stockholm, Granit and Samuelsson; prize money allowed us to have our second family

30:38:24 Was President of the Royal Society for five years; J.J. Thompson Master of Trinity until the age of eighty-four as there was no retirement age; absent mindedness; brief memories of John Maynard Keynes whose nephew Richard Keynes' work has been close to mine; most brilliant person I knew was Alan Hodgkin; Quaker ancestry; during the war he was developing radar for the Air Force at Malvern while I was in operation research for Anti-Aircraft Command, also in Malvern; Bernard Lovell was wanting in record fluctuations in radar traces and mentioned it to Alan; I had an idea using a Leica camera, that I still use, to photograph the traces from a cathode ray tube; got interested in Anti-Aircraft Command, again through A.V. Hill; during the First World War he had been in a team developing anti-aircraft gunnery at Portsmouth and was in touch with General Pile who was in charge of Anti-Aircraft Command; Pile needed a scientific advisor and Hill put him in touch with Patrick Blackett, the physicist; Hill provided him with three assistants, Leonard Baylis, lecturer at University College, his son, David, and I - all physiologists, but also the mathematics and statistics to deal with the problems; our work was largely adapting the predictors to use radar data; Blackett was transferred to the Admiralty and late 1941 got me transferred to the Admiralty where I did the same sort of work in the gunnery division of the Naval Staff; gunnery division concerned with the use of guns and their accuracy; had several trips on battleships

46:00:03 Cambridge is a good place to work though most of my near relatives went to Oxford; Cambridge was the place to come to for people with an interest in science; how traditions develop is hard to say, clearly a large element of chance but also cause and effect, both needed; Francis Huxley; have written the beginnings of an autobiography but may just be for internal consumption