History
The fundamental properties of currents mediated by ion channels were analyzed by the British biophysicists Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley as part of their Nobel Prize-winning research on the action potential, published in 1952. They built on the work of other physiologists, such as Cole and Baker's research into voltage-gated membrane pores from 1941. The existence of ion channels was confirmed in the 1970s by Bernard Katz and Ricardo Miledi using noise analysis. It was then shown more directly with an electrical recording technique known as the "patch clamp", which led to a Nobel Prize to Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann, the technique's inventors. Hundreds if not thousands of researchers continue to pursue a more detailed understanding of how these proteins work. In recent years the development of automated patch clamp devices helped to increase significantly the throughput in ion channel screening.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2003 was awarded to two American scientists: Roderick MacKinnon for his studies on the physico-chemical properties of ion channel structure and function, including x-ray crystallographic structure studies, and Peter Agre for his similar work on aquaporins.
Read more about this topic: Ion Channel
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)