Lord Adrian, MD, PRS, OM

Abstract

Edgar Douglas Adrian was an outstandingly brilliant, Nobel prize-winning neurophysiologist. He is remembered for developing the all-or-none principle of muscle contraction, and for explaining the minutiae of motor and sensory nerve transmission. He showed that the afferent effect in a neuron depends on the pattern in time of the impulses travelling in it, thereby providing a quantitative basis of nervous behaviour. With Sir Charles Sherrington, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1932 for discoveries on the functions of the neurons.