A couple with three children waited in line at San Francisco's Pier 41 to purchase tickets for a boat trip to Alcatraz. Others watched with varying degrees of sympathy and irritation as the young children fidgeted, whined, and punched one another. The frazzled parents reprimanded them to no avail.
Finally they reached the ticket window. "Five tickets, please," the father said. "Two round trip, three one way."
Sir Alan HodgkinBorn 5 Feb 1914; died 20 Dec 1998 at age 84. Alan Lloyd Hodgkin was an English physiologist and biophysicist who shared (with his countryman Sir Andrew Huxley and Australian scientist Sir John Eccles) the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1963, for the discovery of the chemical processes involved in nerve conduction, more specifically, discoveries concerning the ionic mechanisms involved in excitation and inhibition in the peripheral and central portions of the nerve cell membrane. Hodgkin and Huxley performed their work on the so-called giant axon of Atlantic squid, Loligo pealei, which enabled them to record ionic currents, which would otherwise have not been possible in almost any other neuron, such cells being too small to study by the techniques of the time.« |
