Eccles, John Carew (1903-1997) was an Australian neurophysiologist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with British scientists Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxley. Eccles was recognized for his research on the transmission of nerve impulses. Hodgkin and Huxley won for their description of the behavior of nerve impulses.
Eccles was born Jan. 27, 1903, in Melbourne, Australia. He studied medicine at Melbourne University, where he graduated in 1925. He received a Rhodes scholarship, which he used to pursue his graduate degree at Oxford University in England. In 1927, he became a research fellow at Exeter College, Oxford.
Early on, Eccles knew he wanted to study the brain and nervous system. After joining Exeter College he obtained his doctorate in 1929. He then remained at Oxford and taught until 1937. That year, Eccles returned to Australia to become the director of the Kanematsu Memorial Institute of Pathology in Sydney. During World War II (1939-1945), he was a medical consultant to the Australian army. From 1944 to 1951, he was a professor of physiology in New Zealand at the University of Otago. In 1952, Eccles returned to Australia and became a professor of physiology at the Australian National University in Canberra. While there, he carried on research on the chemical changes that take place during the transmission of signals between nerve cells or from nerve cell to muscle cell. He was knighted in 1958.
In 1966, Eccles moved to the United States and became director of the research laboratory of the American Medical Association's Institute for Bio-medical Research in Chicago. He left Chicago in 1968 to become a professor and research fellow at the State University of New York. In 1975, he retired as professor emeritus. He then moved to Switzerland.
Eccles died on May 2, 1997.