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Huxley’s science fiction: ion channels in pain, pain resilience, and beyond

Published on February 27, 2025   52 min

A selection of talks on Neuroscience

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This is Steve Waxman at the Yale School of Medicine. My talk is entitled Huxley's Science Fiction. What I'm really going to talk about is ion channels and their multiple roles in pain, pain resilience, and the spectrum of other disorders.
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This is my disclosure slide.
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This slide shows on the top a diagram that appears in virtually every textbook of physiology. It shows the Hodgkin-Huxley mechanism of generation of nerve impulses action potentials. They did this work in 1949. It was published in 1952. What it shows is an action potential, a nerve impulse from the squid giant axon, that's in blue. It shows the crucial dependence of the action potential on the opening of sodium channels, those are in yellow. It shows that termination, the end of the action potential depends on the opening of potassium channels, those is shown in pink. This work as I said, was done in 1952. Molecular biology was in its infancy, modern microelectrodes were not available, modern computers didn't exist. But despite that, Hodgkin and Huxley were able to predict with prescient precision the properties of sodium channels and they got the Nobel Prize for this work in 1963. It remains one of the bastions of modern electrophysiology. Now, in 1995, I edited a book called The Axon, The Nerve Fiber and I asked Andrew Huxley, by then he was Sir Andrew Huxley, if he would write an introductory chapter. He very graciously did. His last two sentences really are I think very important. What they said in those last two sentences, what he said was, "When Hodgkin and I finished the 1952 Nobel Prize papers, we turned to other lines of work, any idea of analyzing ion channels by molecular genetics or patch clamp would have seemed to them to be science fiction." I show this because almost all of the listeners, watchers of this lecture are walking through the science fiction of our forebears and our job as we learn new things is to take our knowledge and help society with it. What this slide shows from 2023,

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Huxley’s science fiction: ion channels in pain, pain resilience, and beyond

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