John Carew Eccles

Australian physiologist

• Born: January 27, 1903
• Birthplace: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
• Died: May 2, 1997
• Place of death: Contra, Switzerland

Eccles made fundamental discoveries concerning the transmission of nerve impulses and the existence of inhibitory neurons that control the spread of such impulses.

Early Life

John Carew Eccles (EHK-ehlz) was born to William James Eccles and Mary (Carew) Eccles, both teachers who carefully oversaw his early education. In 1919, Eccles entered Melbourne University to study medicine. At the university, he was not only an honors student but also a very successful athlete particularly in tennis, cross-country racing, and pole-vaulting. While still an undergraduate, he began to think about questions concerning the relationship of mind and brain, which would be the focus of his entire scientific career. His dream was to attend Oxford University and study with Sir Charles S. Sherrington, then the world’s leading expert on the nervous system. In 1925, Eccles was graduated from Melbourne University with bachelor’s degrees in science and medicine, taking first-class honors in the latter. His academic dream was fulfilled when he received a Rhodes Scholarship, which permitted him to spend two years at Magdalen College, Oxford.

During Eccles’s tenure at Oxford, which would last until 1937, he completed his education and began his career in scientific investigation. In 1927, he took first-class honors in natural science, winning the Christopher Welch Scholarship and a junior research fellowship at Exeter College, where he became part of Sherrington’s research team. He earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in 1929 and, in conjunction with Sherrington, published eight papers concerning nerve impulses and synapses by 1931. Over the course of his career, Eccles and his various associates would produce more than five hundred scientific papers, articles, and other publications. From 1932 to 1934, Eccles held the Staines Medical Fellowship at Exeter College.

Life’s Work

As with many academics, Eccles’s professional endeavors grew progressively out of his work as a student. At Oxford in the 1930’s, he moved from student to instructor in 1934 becoming a tutorial fellow at Magdalen College and a university demonstrator in physiology while continuing the line of research he had initiated on arrival. He had evolved a hypothesis concerning the electrical nature of nerve impulses, while Sir Henry Dale, a colleague, was arguing for chemical transmission. Eccles eventually came to accept Dale’s ideas, but more delicate instruments have since shown that in certain synapses there is also electrical activity.

In 1937, the growing menace of fascism influenced Eccles’s decision to return to Australia. Although he later expressed regret at not standing his ground against the growing threat from the Continent, he was far from the only distinguished scholar to seek secure ground on which to pursue his research. Following his return to his home country, Eccles became director of the Kanematsu Memorial Institute of Pathology at Sydney Hospital. Research was at first difficult because the institute was little more than the hospital’s regular pathology department and Sydney University Medical School mostly a teaching institution. Eccles created his own facilities, drawing into his work Stephen Kuffler, a refugee from Austria, and Bernard Katz, a Carnegie Fellow. Their work on neuromuscular transmission in frogs and cats, which proved valuable for the study of muscle relaxants, was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II.

In 1941, the year he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, Eccles turned his attention to work for the Australian military. He chaired committees studying problems with vision, hearing, and airsickness. In addition, the institute processed blood serum for the entire Pacific theater of war. After three years of this work, he moved to New Zealand, where he became a professor of physiology at the University of Otago Medical School. He found it necessary to teach much of the first two years’ curriculum in physiology but still found time to begin research on monosynaptic reflexes in the spinal column by inserting extremely fine glass microelectrodes into mononeurones. This work began to show the relationship between excitatory and inhibitory cells in the spinal cord.

While in New Zealand, Eccles met Karl Popper, who was building his reputation as a philosopher of science. Eccles was greatly impressed by Popper’s ideas of scientific methodology involving development of creative hypotheses followed by extremely rigorous experimentation. The key was that proving a hypothesis false was as useful as proving it valid. Knowledge was increased either way, and a scientist whose hypothesis provoked investigation had surely made a contribution of note. Eccles was inspired to expand his scientific horizons as well as to redouble his laboratory work. A friendship and collaboration that would in time be extremely productive had been established.

In 1952, the peripatetic Eccles returned to Australia to become a professor of physiology at the Australian National University in Canberra. The institution was just being built, and once again Eccles had to begin a tenure by helping to create his own research facilities, carrying on his work in makeshift quarters in the meantime. On this occasion, however, the building was supported by a government prepared to invest generously in the creation of a graduate research institution, with an eye to making Australia one of the world’s leaders in science. Eccles’s work during the 1950’s helped to do just that. He eventually established that there were two types of nerve cells in the spinal column: excitatory and inhibitory, each with a single function. The excitatory cells transmitted impulses, while the inhibitory acted as a control to prevent the transmission from becoming chaotic. He also studied the effect of nerve impulses on muscle contraction during this period.

Major publications and increasing prestigious honors followed. In 1953, The Neurophysicological Basis of the Mind was published through the Clarendon Press of Oxford University, and four years later, Johns Hopkins University Press issued The Physiology of Nerve Cells. Eccles was president of the Australian Academy of Sciences from 1957 to 1961 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1958. He shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxley. Although Eccles had worked independently of the other winners, their work was complementary and mutually inspiring.

Not one to rest even on substantial laurels, Eccles expanded his research to the brain itself, finding in the cerebral cortex the same sort of inhibitory process that he had identified in the spinal column. Inhibition serves to prevent brain circuits from becoming overloaded and nerve impulses from countering one another. This work was described in The Physiology of Synapses (1964). He also began to study the way the brain integrates and stores information in the cerebellum and the process by which data is then released as needed.

Unfortunately, bureaucratic insistence on retirement at age sixty-five meant that unless he was willing to accept a much-reduced level of support, Eccles could not remain at Australian National University after 1966. Hardly enfeebled by age, he published, in association with M. Ito and J. Szentagothai, The Cerebellum as a Neuronal Machine (1967), The Inhibitory Pathways of the Central Nervous System (1969), and Facing Reality: Philosophical Adventures of a Brain Scientist (1970), and he promptly accepted the position of head of the Institute for Biomedical Research of the American Medical Association (AMA) in Chicago. His connection with the AMA did not prove satisfactory, and again under pressure to retire, Eccles moved a final time, becoming Distinguished Professor of Physiology and Medicine at the Medical School of the State University of New York at Buffalo. A neurobiology laboratory was created for him in Buffalo, where he continued his research until voluntary retirement to Switzerland in 1975. Eccles’s only expressed regret on ending his American tenure, despite its inauspicious beginning, was that so few American students had chosen to take up the line of work he had pioneered.

Although it took him out of the laboratory, retirement did little to slow Eccles’s prolific publishing. He began to expand his philosophic speculations (already published in works such as Facing Reality) about the nature of being human. As he had before, he drew inspiration from Popper, and the two collaborated on The Self and Its Brain (1976). Drawing on the results of fully half a century of study of the human organism, Eccles rejected efforts to portray humankind as merely a species of animal despite the natural evolution of the human body. Biological science cannot, he believed, satisfactorily account for the appearance of human self-consciousness, of awareness of death. Nor is there any precedent in the animal kingdom for the higher linguistic and ethical functions of humans. Thus, a lifetime of studying the relationship of mind and brain led Eccles to believe that the mind, the quality that differentiates humankind from the rest of nature, must be the result of supernatural creation: “We come,” he says in Facing Reality, “to the religious concept of the soul and its special creation by God.” Eccles’s philosophical speculations resulted in a number of publications. His ideas are perhaps most clearly laid out in The Human Mystery (1978) and (with Daniel N. Robinson) The Wonder of Being Human: Our Brain and Our Mind (1984).

Significance

Eccles’s career is a microcosm of modern science. Beginning in the early twentieth century when financial support for the small scientific community was virtually nonexistent, he became a productive researcher and author, with a total of fifteen books published. His work was important not only for what he added to the knowledge of physiology but also for his contribution to the enormous expansion of support and facilities for scientists of the middle and latter parts of the century. His travels and the welcome he found on three continents illustrate the growing international nature of scholarship.

Although many would disagree with his philosophical conclusions about the origins of humankind, the continued expansion of Eccles’s speculations is typical of his intellectual activity. The importance of Popper’s ideas about advancing imaginative hypotheses and then subjecting them to rigorous examination is central to an understanding of Eccles’s thought, scientific and philosophical. Few scholars have approached Eccles’s ability to probe deeply and productively into a specific area of research without sacrificing time or ability to synthesize or both.

Bibliography

Eccles, John C. “From Electrical to Chemical Transmission in the Central Nervous System.” Notes and Records. Royal Society 30 (1976): 219-230. Eccles’s own account of the transition in his thought from his own hypothesis of electrical transmission of nerve impulses to that of chemical transmission advocated by Henry Dale.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “My Scientific Odyssey.” Annual Review of Physiology 39 (1979): 1-18. An autobiographical article tracing the whole of Eccles’s career.

Granit, Ragnar. Charles Scott Sherrington: An Appraisal. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967. A useful source for background about the sort of work Eccles did. Also discusses his work. Personal comments on Eccles’s scientific life through 1955.

Karczmar, Alexander G. “Sir John Eccles, 1903-1997.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44, no. 1 (Winter, 2001): 76.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Sir John Eccles, 1903-1997.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44, no. 2 (Spring, 2001): 250. This two-part article provides information about Eccles’s life and work, including his research about the cerebellum and chemical transmission in the central nervous system.

Robinson, Donald. The One Hundred Most Important People in the World. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970. Contains a short biographical sketch of Eccles.