In the 1950s, Sirs Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxley started to elucidate the ionic mechanisms involved in excitation and inhibition of the nerve cell membrane. Through studies in the squid giant axon, Hodgkin and Huxley, who jointly garnered the Nobel in physiology or medicine in 1963, discovered how electrical conductance controls the action of nerve cells. But they hadn't proposed a physical mechanism, a molecule-based concept for what the membrane was doing.
"A lot of people didn't care," said Hille, a professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Washington. "But both Clay and I imagined molecules. We didn't know particularly what molecules, but we were thinking in terms of billiard balls and machines and wanted to realize it as a mechanical device." Hille and Armstrong, now a professor of physiology at the University of Pennsylvania, began working on the problem independently in 1964. They ...
