One of the great research papers of the 20th century celebrates its 60th anniversary in a few weeks time: A quantitative description of membrane current and its application to conduction and excitation in nerve by Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley. Only a shortly after Andrew Huxley died, 30th May 2012, aged 94.
In 1952 Hodgkin and Huxley published a series of papers, describing the basic processes underlying the nervous mechanisms of control and the communication between nerve cells, for which they received the Nobel prize in physiology and medicine, together with John Eccles in 1963.
Their research was based on electrophysiological experiments carried out in the late 1940s and early 1950 on a giant squid axon to understand how action potentials in neurons are initiated and propagated.
