The idea that nerves carry electrical signals between the brain and the body goes back to the 18th century, when Italian physician and physicist Luigi Galvani noticed that a small jolt of electricity would cause a dissected frog's leg to twitch. But nerve fibers are not simple conductors like the copper wires of a telegraph network. Although electrical activity is key to nerve action, the process that moves a pulse of information along the fiber is a good deal more complicated than the flow of electrons through a wire. The search for the true mechanism of nerve transmission culminated in a series of ingenious and painstaking experiments done by a pair of British physiologists: Alan Lloyd Hodg-kin (1914-1998) and Andrew Fielding Huxley (1917-2012). They reported their results in five papers, which all appeared in the Journal of Physiology in 1952. Hodgkin and Huxley received a Nobel Prize for this work in 1963 (shared with John Eccles).
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