Abstract
PROF. E. D. ADRIAN, who succeeds Sir Joseph Barcroft to the Cambridge chair, has also spent all his scientific life in Cambridge, where he is now a Foulerton research professor of the Royal Society. Before the Great War he worked with Keith Lucas on the problems presented by the impulses in motor nerves. He then left Cambridge, obtained a medical qualification, and quickly showed that he could have been a very successful clinician. He was R.M.O. at the National Hospital, Queen Square, and during the War he had experience of the treatment of shell-shock. In 1919, he returned to Cambridge and started his well-known work on the physical basis of sensation. All knowledge depends on the brain's analysis of impulses arriving in sensory nerves. Adrian took advantage of the new methods for amplifying small electric currents and tapped the messages in the nerves. He has thus analysed the activity of sense organs in a way that was not previously possible. In recognition of this work he received, with Sir Charles Sherrington, a share of the Nobel prize for medicine in 1932. He is now called upon to spread his interests more widely than in the past, and to devote his clear brain and ready understanding to helping investigations in many branches of physiology.
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Prof. E. D. Adrian, F.R.S.. Nature 139, 436 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/139436c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/139436c0