John Carew Eccles

Born Jan. 27, 1903, in Melbourne. Australian physiologist.

Eccles graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1925 and from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1929. He worked in Oxford from 1927 to 1937 under C. Sherrington and was director of the Kanematsu Memorial Institute of Pathology in Sydney from 1937 to 1944. He was professor of physiology at Otago University, New Zealand, from 1944 to 1951 and professor of physiology at the Australian National University in Canberra from 1951 to 1966.

Eccles served as president of the Australian Academy of Sciences from 1957 to 1961. He worked in the Institute for Biomedical Research in Chicago from 1966 to 1968 and became a distinguished professor and director of the Institute of Neurobiology and dean of the department of public health of the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1963.

Eccles has mainly done research on electrical processes in nerve cells. He made an important contribution to the study of the ionic mechanisms of excitation and inhibition of nerve cells. He showed how nerve impulses arise in one cell and are then transmitted to an adjacent cell. Eccles has been a fellow of the Royal Society since 1941. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1963, along with A. L. Hodgkin and A. F. Huxley.