Edgar Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian
Encyclopedia
Edgar Douglas Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian OM
PRS
(30 November 1889 – 4 August 1977) was a British
electrophysiologist
and recipient of the 1932 Nobel Prize for Physiology
, won jointly with Sir Charles Sherrington
for work on the function of neuron
s.
, London to Alfred Douglas Adrian, CB MC, legal adviser to the Local Government Board
, and Flora Lavinia Barton. He attended Westminster School
before going on to the University of Cambridge
, where he studied Natural Sciences at Trinity College
. He continued to live in Cambridge
for the major part of his life.
Completing a medical degree in 1915, he did clinical work at St Bartholomew's Hospital
London during World War I
, treating soldiers with nerve damage and nervous disorders such as shell shock
. Adrian returned to Cambridge in 1919 and in 1925 began his studies of nerve impulses in the human sensory organs.
Adrian married Hester Agnes Pinsent
on 14 June 1923 and they had three children, a daughter and mixed twins
:
, he used a capillary electrometer and cathode ray tube
to amplify the signals produced by the nervous system
and was able to record the electrical discharge of single nerve fibres under physical stimulus. An accidental discovery by Adrian in 1928 proved the presence of electricity within nerve cells. Adrian said,
A key result, published in 1928, stated that the excitation of the skin under constant stimulus is initially strong but gradually decreases over time, whereas the sensory impulses passing along the nerves from the point of contact are constant in strength, yet are reduced in frequency over time, and the sensation in the brain diminishes as a result.
Extending these results to the study of pain causes by the stimulus of the nervous system, he made discoveries about the reception of such signals in the brain and spatial distribution of the sensory areas of the cerebral cortex
in different animals. These conclusions lead to the idea of a sensory map, called the homunculus
, in the somatosensory system
.
Later, Adrian used the electroencephalogram to study the electrical activity of the brain in humans
. His work on the abnormalities of the Berger
rhythm paved the way for subsequent investigation in epilepsy
and other cerebral pathologies. He spent the last portion of his research career investigating olfaction
.
Among the many awards and positions he received during his career were Foulerton Professor 1929-1937; Professor of Physiology at the University of Cambridge
1937-1951; President of the Royal Society 1950-1955; Master of Trinity College, Cambridge
1951-1965; president of the Royal Society of Medicine
1960–1962; Chancellor of the University of Cambridge 1967-1975; and Chancellor of the University of Leicester
1957–1971. Adrian was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 1938. In 1942 he was awarded the Order of Merit
, and in 1955 was created Baron Adrian
, of Cambridge in the County of Cambridge.
Order of Merit
The Order of Merit is a British dynastic order recognising distinguished service in the armed forces, science, art, literature, or for the promotion of culture...
PRS
President of the Royal Society
The president of the Royal Society is the elected director of the Royal Society of London. After informal meetings at Gresham College, the Royal Society was founded officially on 15 July 1662 for the encouragement of ‘philosophical studies’, by a royal charter which nominated William Brouncker as...
(30 November 1889 – 4 August 1977) was a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
electrophysiologist
Electrophysiology
Electrophysiology is the study of the electrical properties of biological cells and tissues. It involves measurements of voltage change or electric current on a wide variety of scales from single ion channel proteins to whole organs like the heart...
and recipient of the 1932 Nobel Prize for Physiology
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine administered by the Nobel Foundation, is awarded once a year for outstanding discoveries in the field of life science and medicine. It is one of five Nobel Prizes established in 1895 by Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, in his will...
, won jointly with Sir Charles Sherrington
Charles Scott Sherrington
Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, OM, GBE, PRS was an English neurophysiologist, histologist, bacteriologist, and a pathologist, Nobel laureate and president of the Royal Society in the early 1920s...
for work on the function of neuron
Neuron
A neuron is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information by electrical and chemical signaling. Chemical signaling occurs via synapses, specialized connections with other cells. Neurons connect to each other to form networks. Neurons are the core components of the nervous...
s.
Biography
Adrian was born at HampsteadHampstead
Hampstead is an area of London, England, north-west of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Camden in Inner London, it is known for its intellectual, liberal, artistic, musical and literary associations and for Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland...
, London to Alfred Douglas Adrian, CB MC, legal adviser to the Local Government Board
Local Government Board
The Local Government Board was a British Government supervisory body overseeing local administration in England and Wales from 1871 to 1919.The LGB was created by the Local Government Board Act 1871 The Local Government Board (LGB) was a British Government supervisory body overseeing local...
, and Flora Lavinia Barton. He attended Westminster School
Westminster School
The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, almost always known as Westminster School, is one of Britain's leading independent schools, with the highest Oxford and Cambridge acceptance rate of any secondary school or college in Britain...
before going on to the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
, where he studied Natural Sciences at Trinity College
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
. He continued to live in Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
for the major part of his life.
Completing a medical degree in 1915, he did clinical work at St Bartholomew's Hospital
St Bartholomew's Hospital
St Bartholomew's Hospital, also known as Barts, is a hospital in Smithfield in the City of London, England.-Early history:It was founded in 1123 by Raherus or Rahere , a favourite courtier of King Henry I...
London during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, treating soldiers with nerve damage and nervous disorders such as shell shock
Shell Shock
Shell Shock, also known as 82nd Marines Attack was a 1964 film by B-movie director John Hayes. The film takes place in Italy during World War II, and tells the story of a sergeant with his group of soldiers....
. Adrian returned to Cambridge in 1919 and in 1925 began his studies of nerve impulses in the human sensory organs.
Adrian married Hester Agnes Pinsent
Hester Adrian
Hester Agnes Adrian, Baroness Adrian, DBE was a British mental health worker. In 1965, the year before her death, she was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions....
on 14 June 1923 and they had three children, a daughter and mixed twins
Mixed twins
Mixed twins are fraternal twins born to multiracial families which differ in skin color and other traits considered to be racial features.From a biological point of view, the differences in these fraternal or dizygotic twins from two biracial parents are not surprising. In humans, a relatively...
:
- Anne Pinsent Adrian, who married the physiologist Richard KeynesRichard KeynesRichard Darwin Keynes, CBE, FRS was a British physiologist. He was a great-grandson of Charles Darwin, and edited accounts and illustrations of Darwin's famous voyage aboard the HMS Beagle into The Beagle Record: Selections From the Original Pictorial Records and Written Accounts of the Voyage of...
- Richard Hume Adrian, 2nd Baron Adrian (1927-1995)
- Jennet Adrian (b. 1927), who married Peter Watson Campbell.
Career
Continuing earlier studies of Keith LucasKeith Lucas
Keith Lucas FRS was a British scientist who worked at Trinity College, Cambridge doing pioneering work in Neuroscience....
, he used a capillary electrometer and cathode ray tube
Cathode ray tube
The cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun and a fluorescent screen used to view images. It has a means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam onto the fluorescent screen to create the images. The image may represent electrical waveforms , pictures , radar targets and...
to amplify the signals produced by the nervous system
Nervous system
The nervous system is an organ system containing a network of specialized cells called neurons that coordinate the actions of an animal and transmit signals between different parts of its body. In most animals the nervous system consists of two parts, central and peripheral. The central nervous...
and was able to record the electrical discharge of single nerve fibres under physical stimulus. An accidental discovery by Adrian in 1928 proved the presence of electricity within nerve cells. Adrian said,
- "I had arranged electrodes on the optic nerve of a toad in connection with some experiments on the retina. The room was nearly dark and I was puzzled to hear repeated noises in the loudspeaker attached to the amplifier, noises indicating that a great deal of impulse activity was going on. It was not until I compared the noises with my own movements around the room that I realized I was in the field of vision of the toad's eye and that it was signaling what I was doing."
A key result, published in 1928, stated that the excitation of the skin under constant stimulus is initially strong but gradually decreases over time, whereas the sensory impulses passing along the nerves from the point of contact are constant in strength, yet are reduced in frequency over time, and the sensation in the brain diminishes as a result.
Extending these results to the study of pain causes by the stimulus of the nervous system, he made discoveries about the reception of such signals in the brain and spatial distribution of the sensory areas of the cerebral cortex
Cerebral cortex
The cerebral cortex is a sheet of neural tissue that is outermost to the cerebrum of the mammalian brain. It plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language, and consciousness. It is constituted of up to six horizontal layers, each of which has a different...
in different animals. These conclusions lead to the idea of a sensory map, called the homunculus
Homunculus
Homunculus is a term used, generally, in various fields of study to refer to any representation of a human being. Historically, it referred specifically to the concept of a miniature though fully formed human body, for example, in the studies of alchemy and preformationism...
, in the somatosensory system
Somatosensory system
The somatosensory system is a diverse sensory system composed of the receptors and processing centres to produce the sensory modalities such as touch, temperature, proprioception , and nociception . The sensory receptors cover the skin and epithelia, skeletal muscles, bones and joints, internal...
.
Later, Adrian used the electroencephalogram to study the electrical activity of the brain in humans
Human brain
The human brain has the same general structure as the brains of other mammals, but is over three times larger than the brain of a typical mammal with an equivalent body size. Estimates for the number of neurons in the human brain range from 80 to 120 billion...
. His work on the abnormalities of the Berger
Hans Berger
Hans Berger was born in Neuses near Coburg, Bavaria, Germany. He is best known as the first to record human electroencephalograms in 1924, for which he invented the electroencephalogram , and the discoverer of the alpha wave rhythm known as "Berger's wave".- Biography :After attending...
rhythm paved the way for subsequent investigation in epilepsy
Epilepsy
Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder characterized by seizures. These seizures are transient signs and/or symptoms of abnormal, excessive or hypersynchronous neuronal activity in the brain.About 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, and nearly two out of every three new cases...
and other cerebral pathologies. He spent the last portion of his research career investigating olfaction
Olfaction
Olfaction is the sense of smell. This sense is mediated by specialized sensory cells of the nasal cavity of vertebrates, and, by analogy, sensory cells of the antennae of invertebrates...
.
Among the many awards and positions he received during his career were Foulerton Professor 1929-1937; Professor of Physiology at the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
1937-1951; President of the Royal Society 1950-1955; Master of Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
1951-1965; president of the Royal Society of Medicine
Royal Society of Medicine
The Royal Society of Medicine is a British charitable organisation whose main purpose is as a provider of medical education, running over 350 meetings and conferences each year.- History and overview :...
1960–1962; Chancellor of the University of Cambridge 1967-1975; and Chancellor of the University of Leicester
University of Leicester
The University of Leicester is a research-led university based in Leicester, England. The main campus is a mile south of the city centre, adjacent to Victoria Park and Wyggeston and Queen Elizabeth I College....
1957–1971. Adrian was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
in 1938. In 1942 he was awarded the Order of Merit
Order of Merit
The Order of Merit is a British dynastic order recognising distinguished service in the armed forces, science, art, literature, or for the promotion of culture...
, and in 1955 was created Baron Adrian
Baron Adrian
Baron Adrian, of Cambridge in the County of Cambridge, was a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It was created on 27 January 1955 for the electrophysiologist and Nobel Prize recipient Edgar Adrian. He was succeeded by his only son, the second Baron. He was Professor of cell physiology at...
, of Cambridge in the County of Cambridge.
External links
- The Master of Trinity at Trinity College, CambridgeTrinity College, CambridgeTrinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...