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Concept
John Eccles (neurophysiologist)
Summary
Sir John Carew Eccles (27 January 1903 – 2 May 1997) was an Australian neurophysiologist and philosopher who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse. He shared the prize with Andrew Huxley and Alan Lloyd Hodgkin.
Eccles was born in Melbourne, Australia. He grew up there with his two sisters and his parents: William and Mary Carew Eccles (both teachers, who home schooled him until he was 12). He initially attended Warrnambool High School (now Warrnambool College) (where a science wing is named in his honour), then completed his final year of schooling at Melbourne High School. Aged 17, he was awarded a senior scholarship to study medicine at the University of Melbourne. As a medical undergraduate, he was never able to find a satisfactory explanation for the interaction of mind and body; he started to think about becoming a neuroscientist. He graduated (with first class honours) in 1925, and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study under Charles Scott Sherrington at Magdalen College, Oxford University, where he received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1929.
In 1937 Eccles returned to Australia, where he worked on military research during World War II. During this time, Eccles was the director of the Kanematsu Institute at Sydney Medical School, where he and Bernard Katz gave research lectures at the University of Sydney, strongly influencing the intellectual environment of the university. After the war, he became a professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand. From 1952 to 1962, he worked as a professor at the John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR) of the Australian National University. From 1966 to 1968, Eccles worked at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago.
In the early 1950s, Eccles and his colleagues performed the research that would lead to his receiving the Nobel Prize. To study synapses in the peripheral nervous system, Eccles and colleagues used the stretch reflex as a model, which is easily studied because it consists of only two neurons: a sensory neuron (the muscle spindle fibre) and the motor neuron.
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