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Top 10 unknown facts about Sir John Eccles

Sir John Carew Eccles was an Australian neurophysiologist and philosopher who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse. He then shared the prize with Andrew Huxley and Alan Llyod Hodgkin.

With the insight of sir John Eccles, we can delve a little further into knowing more about him.

1. John Eccles’s early childhood 

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John Carew Eccles was born in Melbourne, Australia, on January 27th, 1903. Eccles owes much to his early training by his father, William James Eccles, who was a teacher as also was his mother, née Mary Carew.

He has a younger sister, Rosamund is one year younger. John is also known as Jack in the family. John Carew was homeschooled by his parents, who were teachers until he was twelve. John studied at Warrnambool High School for four years but transferred to Melbourne High School for the last year. John Carew was awarded a senior scholarship, owing to his performance at school and state geometry competitions.

2. Sir John Eccles’s academic journey

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Eccles attended Warrnambool High School and Melbourne High School, where he was privileged enough to win a scholarship to study Medicine at the University of Melbourne, where he enrolled at age 17. An enthusiastic athlete broke the Australian Universities’ pole vaulting record.

Eccles further graduated from Melbourne with first-class honors in 1925, at age 22.  Rhodes Scholarship then took him to the University of Oxford, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1929.

During his research work, it was supervised by Charles Scott Sherrington, whose work on neurons earned him the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Sherrington coined the term synapse to describe the gap between neurons, and he was a powerful influence on Eccles’s future work. Despite an age gap of 46 years, the two became close friends.

After the award of his Ph.D., Eccles continued research work at Oxford for a further eight years, then returned to Australia.

3. John Carew Eccles family

Eccles married his first wife, Irene Frances Miller of Motueka, New Zealand, in 1928. They had four sons and five daughters. Two of his sons are also scientists. One is a radar meteorologist. One of his daughters, Rosamond, has collaborated with him in much of his neurophysiological research.

In 1968, Irene and John Eccles were divorced and he married Helena Táboríková of Prague, Czechoslovakia, who is an M.D. of Charles University and a neurophysiologist. They also collaborated in their research.

4. Eccles studies on synapses

In the early 1950s, Eccles and his colleagues performed the research that would win Eccles the Nob price. To study synapses in the peripheral nervous system, Eccles and colleagues used the stretch reflex as a model.

This reflex is easily studied because it consists of only two neurons: A sensory neuron (the muscle spindle fiber) and the motor neuron. The sensory neuron synapses with the motor neuron in the spinal cord. When Eccles passed a current into the sensory neuron in the quadriceps, the motor neuron innervating the quadriceps produced a small excitatory postsynaptic potential (EPSP).

When he passed the same current through the hamstring, the opposing muscle to the quadriceps, he saw an inhibitory postsynaptic potential (IPSP) in the quadriceps motor neuron. Although a single EPSP was not enough to fire an action potential in the motor neuron, the sum of several EPSPs from multiple sensory neurons synapsing onto the motor neuron could cause the motor neuron to fire, thus contracting the quadriceps. On the other hand, IPSPs could subtract from this sum of EPSPs, preventing the motor neuron from firing.

Apart from these seminal experiments, Eccles was key to several important developments in neuroscience. Until around 1949, Eccles believed that synaptic transmission was primarily electrical rather than chemical. Although he was wrong in this hypothesis, his arguments led him and others to perform some of the experiments that proved chemical synaptic transmission. Bernard Katz and Eccles worked together on some of the experiments, which elucidated the role of acetylcholine as a neurotransmitter.

5. John Eccles’s achievements

Eccles was appointed a Knight bachelor in 1958 in recognition of services to physiological research. He won the Australian of the Year Award in 1963, the same year he won the Nobel Prize.

In 1964 he became an honorary member of the American philosophical society, and in 1966 he moved to the United States to work at the institute for Biomedical Research in Chicago. While he was unhappy with the working conditions there, he left to become a professor at the University at Buffalo from 1968 until he retired in 1975. After retirement, he moved to Switzerland and wrote about the mind-body problem.

In 1981, Eccles became a founding member of the World cultural council. In  1990 he was appointed a companion of the order of Australia (AC) in recognition of service to science, particularly in the field of neurophysiology. He died in 1997 in Tenero-contra, Locarno, Switzerland.

In March 2012, the Eccles Institute of Neuroscience was constructed in a new wing of the John Curtin school medical research with the assistance of a grant from the Commonwealth Government.

6. Karl Popper and Thinking Big as Eccles’s motivation and role model 

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During his time in New Zealand, Eccles enjoyed exchanging ideas with the philosopher of science, Karl Popper. Eccles claimed his future work was strongly influenced by Popper’s view that scientific progress is maximized when scientists put forward big, bold, challenging theories with sufficient content to be falsifiable.

7. John Eccles Christian life

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Eccles was a Christian and occasionally a practicing Roman Catholic. He believed in a Divine Providence that operated over and above the materialistic happenings of biological evolution.

8. Sir John Eccles written books 

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Among his scientific books are Reflex Activity of the Spinal Cord (1932), The Physiology of Nerve Cells (1957), The Inhibitory Pathways of the Central Nervous System (1969), and The Understanding of the Brain (1973). He also wrote several philosophical works, including Facing Reality: Philosophical Adventures by a Brain Scientist (1970) and The Human Mystery (1979).

9. The legendary icon Eccles’s death

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Sir John Carew Eccles, 94, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who was one of this century’s pioneers in discovering and exploring how messages are transmitted in the brain and nervous system, died May 2 in Switzerland.

John Eccles died in the small Swiss village of Tenero-Contra. No cause of death was given.