wiring up

WHEN the commonplaces of one discipline are applied to an unrelated field, they can prove curiously fruitful. In 1952 two British physiologists, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, managed just such a fruitful crossover, applying textbook physics to living tissue. They were both later knighted, and shared a Nobel prize in 1963. The experimental method they pioneered remains fundamental to research into the behaviour of nerve cells. As anyone who has ever had an electric shock knows, electricity …

…called this the gating current. It flows when, under the influence of a voltage across the membrane, charged molecular plugs break away to unblock the channels. Research today concentrates on matching what is known of the molecular structure of the channels, with ever finer readings of their electrical behaviour, to discover how and why the channels open and close. This continues the escape from "biological generalisations", in favour of Dr Hodgkin's and Dr Huxley's approach.