Eccles, Sir John Carew [key], 1903–97, Australian neurophysiologist. He was educated at the Univ. of Melbourne and at Magdalene College, Oxford. He was director (1937–44) of the Kanematsu Research Institute of Sydney Hospital and taught at the Univ. of Otago in New Zealand and at the Australian National Univ. In 1966 he went to Northwestern Univ. in Evanston, Ill., where he became head of the Institute for Biomedical Research; in 1968 he became head of the research unit of neurobiology at the State Univ. of New York at Buffalo. He shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sir Alan L. Hodgkin and Sir Andrew F. Huxley for work on the transmission of signals from nerve cells; Eccles showed that the transmission was both electrical and chemical.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Medicine: Biographies
