Alan Hodgkin
physiologist and biophysicist (1914-1998)
Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin (5 February 1914 – 20 December 1998) was an English physiologist and biophysicist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Huxley and John Eccles.
Early life and education
Hodgkin was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, on 5 February 1914. He was the oldest of three sons of Quakers George Hodgkin and Mary Wilson Hodgkin. His father was the son of Thomas Hodgkin and had read for the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge where he had befriended electrophysiologist Keith Lucas.
Because of poor eyesight, he was unable to study medicine and eventually ended up working for a bank in Banbury. As members of the Society of Friends, George and Mary opposed the Military Service Act of 1916, which introduced conscription, and had to endure a great deal of abuse from their local community, including an attempt to throw George in one of the town canals. In 1916, George Hodgkin travelled to Armenia as part of an investigation of distress. Moved by the misery and suffering of Armenian refugees he attempted to go back there in 1918 on a route through the Persian Gulf (as the northern route was closed because of the October Revolution in Russia). He died of dysentery in Baghdad on 24 June 1918, just a few weeks after his youngest son, Keith, had been born.
From an early life on, Hodgkin and his brothers were encouraged to explore the country around their home, which instilled in Alan an interest in natural history, particularly ornithology.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Alan Hodgkin” as physiologist and biophysicist (1914-1998). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q193650. VIAF identifies the subject as 22214835. The Library of Congress control number is n91070458. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1914, 1998, 1963 and 1916.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alan Hodgkin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.