Book Reviews

ALAN HODGKIN, Chance and design: reminiscences of science in peace and war, Cambridge
University Press, 1992, pp. xi, 412, illus., £40.00, $59.95 (hardback 0-521-40099-6).

Just over forty years ago a revolution in biology was heralded by a series of papers in the Journal
of PhYsiology in which Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley described the membrane currents across
the squid giant axon, analysed the underlying ionic mechanisms and derived a mathematical
hypothesis of the nerve action potential that depended upon the external concentration of sodium
ions. For their work they were awarded Nobel Prizes in 1963 and both subsequently achieved a
parallel array of distinctions and honours: knighthood, the Order of Merit; Mastership of Trinity
College, Cambridge, Presidency of the Royal Society.

Sir Alan Hodgkin's autobiography, an extension of a brief chapter written for the centenary of the
Physiological Society in 1976, now describes some of the scientific and personal background to that
work. Particularly poignant is the successful experiment, in Plymouth in August 1939, when he and
Huxley first recorded the potential difference across the axon membrane. Within three weeks of that
achievement, Hitler invaded Poland, and the technique was abandoned for eight years whilst the
young physiologists were seconded to other duties.

Those intervening years provide a substantial component of this volume, as reflected in
its subtitle. Despite a strong Quaker upbringing, a visit to Nazi Germany in the early 1930s
had stripped Hodgkin of his pacifist beliefs, and he was eager to enter war service, not least because
a demanding job would alleviate the frustration at having to abandon his nerve experiments.
After a short spell in aviation medicine, Hodgkin spent much of the war, like many other natural
scientists, in radar research. His account supplements and illuminates several recent publications
including Radar days by E. G. Bowen, whom Hodgkin thought inspiring, incisive, but shabbily
treated by the authorities; and Echoes of war by Sir Bernard Lovell, from whom Hodgkin learned,
amongst other valuable skills, the mysterious art of filling in Air Ministry requisition forms
effectively.

After the war Hodgkin returned to Cambridge, teaching and tutoring students on accelerated
two-year courses, slowly re-building equipment and beginning experiments on crab nerves,
behaving, as his wife wrote, like a dolphin suddenly released into the open sea. With Huxley,
recently demobbed from the Navy, he worked on a hypothesis about the role of sodium ions in the
generation of the action potential, work terminated by the energy crisis of the winter of 1946 which
made laboratory conditions impossible for the experiments. In the spring of 1947 he managed his
first post war trip to the Marine Laboratory, Plymouth. Here, in a badly damaged building, with
squid in short supply and unsure of his rusty experimental technique, he started testing the
hypothesis more rigorously, and by July Hodgkin and Huxley were able to give a short paper to the
International Physiological Congress, announcing the sodium theory of nerve excitation, the first
solid step towards Stockholm.

As the author suggests, a fictional account might finish with the successful conclusion of the
scientific project begun so many years earlier. Fortunately, Sir Alan provides a postscript: the Nobel
ceremony itself, after a curious false alarm two years earlier; the trip to Stockholm three years later
when his father-in-law, Peyton Rous, also won a Nobel Prize; the years as President of the Royal
Society, especially the foreign visits to Japan and China, the latter still in the throes of the cultural
revolution; and the period as Master of Trinity, are all engagingly described.

In both detail and generality this book gives a fascinating picture of an important facet of
twentieth-century biomedical science, through the eyes of one of its most notable practitioners. The
development of a nature-loving schoolboy into a mature professional scientist; the practical
difficulties of experimental physiology, and the importance of finding the right question, the right
collaborator and the right biological preparation are all emphasized, as are the responsibilities of
science and scientists in wartime.

E. M. Tansey, Wellcome Institute

348

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