Centenary of the Physiological Laboratory

Lord Edgar Adrian

Lord Edgar Adrian studied Natural Sciences at Trinity College Cambridge and held a Fellowship at Trinity College by 1913. After completing his medical degree in London, he returned to the new home of The Physiological Laboratory as a lecturer in 1919. He was the Professor of Physiology from 1937-1951. Lord Adrian recorded action potentials in response to sensory stimuli from single nerve fibres and, with Keith Lucas, described the ‘all or none’ property of the action potential.  Lord Adrian became a Fellow (1925) and later President (1950-1955) of the Royal Society and in 1951, Master of Trinity College.

With Sir Charles Sherrington, Lord Adrian was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1932 : "for their discoveries regarding the functions of neurons".

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1932/adrian-facts.html
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1932/adrian-lecture.html

Sir Joseph Barcroft

Sir Joseph Barcroft attended a local Cambridge school, The Leys and was awarded a BSc from London whilst still at school. He came up to King’s College Cambridge and studied Natural Sciences, graduating in 1896 and becoming a Fellow of King’s College. During WW1 and WW2 he served at Porton Down- at times carrying out experiments on himself! One hundred years ago Sir Joseph Barcroft published ‘The Respiratory Function of the Blood’ and during his career he was also interested in altitude physiology- organising mountaineering expeditions- and the fetal circulation. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1910 and the Professor of Physiology in Cambridge in 1925.

Sir Robert Edwards

After leaving school towards the end of WW2, Sir R.G. Edwards, born into a working class family from Yorkshire, of which he was particularly proud, served  in the British Army for four years of war service, before studying Agricultural Science and Biology at Bangor University. From there, he went to the Institute of Genetics in Edinburgh University, where he obtained his PhD in 1958. He came to The Physiological Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 1963 and was a fellow of Churchill College Cambridge. In Cambridge, Sir R.G. Edwards studied human fertilization. His work, alongside Patrick Steptoe, led in 1978 to the first baby born after “test tube fertilization”- offering hope to couples diagnosed as infertile.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2010 was awarded to Robert G. Edwards "for the development of in vitro fertilization".

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2010/edwards-bio.html

Sir Michael Foster

Sir Michael Foster was the father of experimental Physiology in Cambridge. Upon his arrival in Cambridge in 1870, from University College London, Sir Michael Foster was appointed Praelector in Physiology by Trinity College. At first he worked in a room furnished with equipment provided by Trinity, later in two rooms off of Downing Street where he gave lectures, ran practical classes and carried out his research. He called these rooms ‘the Physiological Laboratory of the University of Cambridge’. In 1883 Sir Michael Foster became the first Professor of Physiology at the University of Cambridge and held this post until 1903. He also founded The Journal of Physiology, was instrumental in setting up The Physiological Society and was a secretary to the Royal Society. He died in 1907, having inspired many students of Physiology and built a strong centre of Physiological research in which ground breaking research would unfold in the following decades.

Archibald Hill

A.V. Hill came up to Trinity College Cambridge to study Mathematics and then after graduating, under the influence of J.N. Langley, studied Physiology. As a Trinity College Research Fellow from 1910, he focused on muscle and heat production, although his research with J.N. Langley on receptor theory was also groundbreaking. All students of drug-receptor binding in pharmacology and enzyme-substrate binding in biochemistry are familiar with the Hill Coefficient, which Hill originally applied to the co-operative binding of O2 molecules to haemoglobin.

 Hill became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918. In 1920 he moved to Manchester University and in 1923 he moved to University College London where he spent most of the rest of his career. During WW2, A.V. Hill was a member of the War Cabinet Scientific Advisory Committee.

A.V. Hill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1922 "for his discovery relating to the production of heat in the muscle" (with Otto Fritz Meyerhof "for his discovery of the fixed relationship between the consumption of oxygen and the metabolism of lactic acid in the muscle").

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1922/hill-bio.html
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1922/hill-lecture.html

Photographs courtesy of Professor Nicholas Humphrey

Sir Alan Hodgkin & Sir Andrew Huxley

Sir Alan Hodgkin came up to Trinity College Cambridge in the 1930s and continued as a Fellow of Trinity then joined the academic staff in The Physiological Laboratory. His research, primarily carried out in The Physiological Laboratory and at the Marine Biology Association in Plymouth, was on the ionic basis of nerve cell conduction. That is, how a nerve cell communicates with other cells, such as another nerve cell or a muscle cell, over long distances in the body. With Sir Andrew Huxley, who came up to Cambridge a few years after Sir Alan, he carried out pioneering work on nerve cells in squid and frogs that allowed the basic ionic mechanisms of nervous conduction, the action potential, to be solved. You can hear about Sir Alan, Sir Andrew and their ground breaking work at the Hodgkin & Huxley display.

Both Sir Alan Hodgkin and Sir Andrew Huxley were Fellows and Presidents of the Royal Society, and they served sequentially as Master of Trinity College.

During WW2, Sir Alan Hodgkin worked on aviation medicine and radar; Sir Andrew Huxley worked for Anti-Aircraft Command and for the Admiralty.

In recognition of the importance of their work, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1963 was awarded jointly to Sir Alan Hodgkin, Sir Andrew Huxley and Sir John Eccles, "for their discoveries concerning the ionic mechanisms involved in excitation and inhibition in the peripheral and central portions of the nerve cell membrane".

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1963/huxley-bio.html
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1963/huxley-lecture.html

John Langley

John Newport Langley succeeded Michael Foster as Professor of Physiology in 1903 and in this role he oversaw the move of the Physiological Laboratory to the present building in 1914, which was provided by the generosity of the Drapers Company. Langley had first come up to St John’s College Cambridge in 1871 and, on changing his subject to Natural Sciences in his second year, was taught by Foster. Langley became a Fellow of Trinity College in 1877, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1883 and held a lectureship in Cambridge from 1884.

Langley championed two major areas of research; following on from Gaskell’s work, he near-single-handedly established the physiology of the autonomic nervous system, the branch of the peripheral nervous system that controls internal organs and glands, including the well know sympathetic ‘fight or flight’ response. He was also the first person (in 1905) to use the term ‘receptive substances’ to describe receptor proteins in the cell membrane that respond to external chemical signals such as hormones and neurotransmitters; from this he developed a theory of drug action. It is on this basis that much of modern pharmacology and pharmaceutical drug development depends. It would be another 70 years before such proteins were isolated from cell membranes. During the first world war, he studied nerve regeneration. In addition, Langley took over from Foster the editorship of the Journal of Physiology and steered it into financial stability.

Bryan Matthews

Sir Bryan Matthews came up to Cambridge in the 1920s to read Natural Sciences and continued in Cambridge as a research student with Lord Adrian. He made significant contributions to physiology, including his work on the nerve fibres carrying information from sensory elements of muscles, the muscle spindle, and his use of electroencephalography (EEG)- the measurement of electrical activity in the brain. Pivotal to this work was Sir Bryan's development of revolutionary technology: the Matthew's Oscillograph for capturing nerve activity, and the differential amplifier for high gain, low noise recording of electrical activity in biological systems (including EEG), which is still widely used today in Physiology and beyond.

In addition, Sir Bryan made many contributions to public life, as Head of RAF Institute of Aviation Medicine (1944–46) at Farnborough and work for the first ascent of Everest (1953 High Altitude Committee). The photograph to the right shows the interior of a decompression chamber used by Sir Bryan at Farnborough.

Sir Bryan Matthews was the Professor of Physiology in Cambridge 1952-1973 and a Fellow of King’s College.

Roger Tsien

Roger Tsien came to the University of Cambridge on a Marshall Scholarship to in 1972 to work towards his Ph.D. with R.H. Adrian, son of E.D. Adrian. Tsien set out to design and synthesise new dyes for imaging neuronal activity and collaborated with Ian Baxter in the Chemistry Department. He eventually made the molecule we now call "BAPTA", from which fluorescent dyes were then developed for visualising calcium ions inside nerve cells and other cell types. After his PhD Tsien became a Research Fellow at Gonville & Caius College Cambridge and collaborated with Timothy Rink in the Physiological Laboratory, making calcium-selective electrodes and then fluorescent indicators for calcium. He moved to Berkley in 1982 and to UCSD in 1989.

Roger Tsien was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008, along with Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP", work that he carried out at Berkley and UCSD.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2008/tsien-bio.html
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2008/tsien-lecture.html