I was browsing the Youtube video website and came across two of my undergraduate teachers, J Z Young and Andrew Huxley.

John Zachary Young was the Professor of Anatomy and was seriously famous and is one of my heroes. I have mentioned him elsewhere in this blog. After I had completed my preclinical studies, I was fortunate to be selected to study for a further 18 months in his department of anatomy tfor a degree in that subject. A major attraction of the course was that for a six week period of the summer vacation six of us joined him in Naples, Italy, to assist him in the study of the nervous systems of octopuses and squid. 5 of us worked on octopuses and I was the squid man. What I had to do, twice a day, was to dissect out a giant squid axon, and measured the speed of nerve conduction using a stimulator and an oscilloscope. JZ, as he was known to everybody, showed me how to dissect out the nerve. Despite this, I did not get a single recordable result for about 2 ½ weeks. I was damaging the nerve. The dissection had to be undertaken using a microscope. He was trying to provide further evidence for the Hodgkin Huxley formula:

cv = sqrt(K a / 2 R_2 C_m) Hodgkin and Huxley 1952
cv : conduction velocity
K : 10470
a : radius of axis cylinder (238um)
R_2: specific resistance of axoplasm (35.4 Ohms)
C_m: capacity per unit of area of membrane (10^-6)

Click on the link below to see JZ demonstrating the anatomy of the giant squid axon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw6_Si5jOpo


Andrew Huxley was the Professor of Physiology At University College London when I was an undergraduate there. He was my physiology tutor for a term. He knew the logarithm tables by heart and showed us this when he marked our practical calculations! He was quite a boring lecturer and we used to count how many times he said “er”. However, it was announced that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on discovering how nerves conducted electricity. This work could not have been undertaken without JZ Young’s discovery of the giant axon in the squid. A huge number of us crowded beneath his window and chanted his name until opened the window and waved. After that his lectures were packed with all sorts of students from different faculties other than medicine. He demonstrated the sound of nerves conducting by inserting electrodes into his own arm.

Click on the link below to hear Professor Huxley explaining his work for the Hodgkin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4Lys3STeq0