Spring 2026 Colloquium - Kathryn Maxson Jones

Title: Sea Change: The Squid Giant Axon and the Transformation of Neurobiology in the 20th Century

 

Abstract: In this talk, Kathryn Maxson Jones will explore selected episodes from her book-in-progress, Sea Change: The Squid Giant Axon and the Transformation of Neurobiology in the 20th Century. In 1952, the physiologists Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley published a quantitative description of the action potential, an electrical impulse central to the process by which nerve cells send signals. The Hodgkin and Huxley (HH) description was based on data gleaned from experiments with a uniquely large nerve fiber, the “squid giant axon” (SGA), and the central premise that the electrical activity of the axon arose from voltage-dependent permeabilities in the nerve fiber membrane to specific ions. By 1977, the HH model had become so fundamental to brains and nervous systems, including for human biology, that one prominent scientist wrote of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology and medicine, for which Hodgkin and Huxley had received a two-thirds share: It was like awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature for “knowledge of typewriters, or of ink!”

Drawing on the published scientific literature and archival correspondence, Maxson Jones will discuss the little-known history of the HH model after 1952. Focusing on how this model became so central to the study of nerve cells and nervous systems between 1952 and 1977, she will explore several sets of experiments wherein biologists, including Hodgkin and Huxley, actively worked to test and expand the HH description from squid to other organisms. The talk will end with a discussion of the historical and historiographical implications, examining scientific and institutional developments associated with the rise of “neuroscience” from the 1950s to the 1970s. Overall, the talk will argue that marine creatures and coastal laboratories played integral roles in these developments.