Sir John Carew Eccles

Sir John Carew Eccles , 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 A. L. Hodgkin and A. F. Huxley for work on the transmission of signals from nerve cells.

Eccles, Sir John Carew (1903–1997) Australian physiologist, who was educated in Melbourne and Oxford, and held appointments in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and, finally, the USA. While in Australia he carried out his best-known work, on the transmission of nerve impulses across synapses, which he attributed to a chemical neurotransmitter that either initiated conduction or inhibited it. He shared the 1963 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with the British physiologists Sir Alan Hodgkin (1914–98) and Sir Andrew Huxley (1917– ), who postulated the sodium pump as the mechanism of impulse propagation.