Background

John Carew Eccles was born on January 27, 1903, in Melbourne, Australia. He was the son of William and Mary Carew Eccles, both teachers.

Education

Initially, John Eccles attended Warrnambool High School (now Warrnambool College), but completed his final year at Melbourne High School. Later, he entered Melbourne University to study medicine and excelled at multiple athletics. When John graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1925 at the top of his class, with a bachelor of science and medicine degrees, and as a Rhodes scholar, he realized his dream to attend Oxford University. There he worked with Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, probably the greatest student of the physiology of the nervous system in the 20th century.

Eccles carried on and developed further his teacher's scientific and philosophical ideas. He graduated from Magdalen College in Oxford in 1927, again with first-class honors and a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford. Side by side with Sherrington, they investigated nerve impulses and synapses, which Sherrington had defined in 1897. In 1929 Eccles received Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees. The scientist continued to research the brain in Oxford until he returned to Australia in 1937.

Career

During the early 1930s Eccles had become interested in the nature of synaptic transmission, particularly in the fundamental question of how signals are transferred from one nerve cell to another. For the next 30 years he pursued this theme in his characteristic style, which was different from that of most scientists. The scientist generally proposed a hypothesis, made it as precise as possible, and championed it with enthusiasm and energy until eventually it was either found to be false or was greatly modified by new experimental data. While many workers feel it is a sign of failure if a pet hypothesis has to be abandoned, Eccles took pleasure in this and was stimulated into a new formulation.

Eccles moved to Sydney in 1937, where he headed the Kanematsu Memorial Institute, a small, isolated research institute attached to a local hospital. With several younger colleagues, including Bernard Katz, who influenced him greatly, he studied the transmission of impulses from nerve to muscle until 1943. During this time, John carried out studies of synaptic transmission in the mammalian nervous system by making electrical recordings from the interior of individual nerve cells and analyzing in great detail the processes of excitation, as well as inhibition, at cell junctions.

During World War II he aided in the Australian war effort by serving on committees on vision, hearing and airsickness, and by synthesizing blood serum for medical facilities.

In 1944 Eccles moved to New Zealand, and until 1951 taught physiology at the Dunedin School of Medicine. He also continued his research on synaptic transmission, and it was in 1951 that he actually disproved his own hypothesis about the electrical nature of synaptic transmission, and henceforth championed the alternate theory of chemical neurotransmission. His own tactic of wildly espousing theories and then rigorously working to prove them wrong was reinforced when he met Dr. Karl Popper in New Zealand, who encouraged him to do just that. These findings further crystallized when he left Otago for the John Curtin School of Medical Research of the Australian National University in Canberra, where he became professor of physiology in 1952.

Eccles was forced to retire from the Australian National University in 1966 upon reached their mandatory retirement age, but quickly accepted an enormous job offer from the American Medical Association to head their largest research group at their Institute for Biomedical Research in Chicago. Soon after, in 1968, he served as Distinguished Professor of Physiology and Medicine and the Dr. Henry C. and Bertha H. Buswell Research Fellow at the medical school of New York State University in Buffalo.

John published his works in numerous scientific journals, gave many public lectures and wrote a series of books, which had wide circulation, including Physiology of Nerve Cells and Physiology of Synapses. In 1966 John also edited Brain and Conscious Experience. The same year, Eccles came to the United States to head up the research laboratory group of the American Medical Association’s Institute for Biomedical Research in Chicago.

During the period from 1968 to 1975 he taught at the State University of New York.

Achievements

• Sir John Carew Eccles made a series of original contributions to the knowledge of how nerve cells communicate with each other. He demonstrated that when a nerve cell is stimulated, it releases a chemical that binds to the membrane of neighboring cells and activates them in turn. John further demonstrated that by the same mechanism a nerve cell can also inhibit the electrical activity of nearby nerve cells.
  
  In 1958 the scientist was appointed a Knight Bachelor in recognition of services to physiological research.
  
  In 1990 John was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in recognition of service to science, particularly in the field of neurophysiology.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Physiology of Nerve Cells 1957
  • The Physiology of Synapses 1964
  • Understanding of the Brain 1977
  • The Inhibitory Pathways of the Central Nervous System 1969
  • Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self
  • The Brain and the Unity of Conscious Experience 1965
  • The Human Mystery
  • The Human Psyche
  • The Neurophysiological Basis of Mind: The Principles of Neurophysiology 1956
  • The Self and Its Brain 1984

Religion

Eccles was a devout theist and a sometime Roman Catholic, and is regarded by many Christians as an exemplar of the successful melding of a life of science with one of faith.

Views

Quotations: "I can now rejoice even in the falsification of a cherished theory, because even this is a scientific success."

"In order that a self may exist there must be some continuity of mental experiences and, particularly, continuity bridging gaps of unconsciousness. For example, the continuity of our self is resumed after sleep, anaesthesia, and the temporary amnesias of concussion and convulsions."

Membership

• 

  Foundation Fellow

  Australian Academy of Science , Australia

  1954

• 

  honorary member

  American Philosophical Society , United States

  1964

• founding member

  World Cultural Council , Mexico

  1981

Connections

John married Irene Frances Miller Eccles in 1928. After his divorce in 1968, Eccles married Helena T. Eccles. The two often collaborated in research and they remained married until his death. Eccles had nine children.

Father:

William Eccles

Mother:

Mary Carew Eccles

First wife:

Irene Frances Miller Eccles

Second wife:

Eccles married Helena T. Eccles