Ion Channels: Their Discovery and their Role in Pharmacology and Biomedicine
The concept of bioelectricity emerged in the late 18th century, based on the experiments of Galvani and Volta. Sixty years ago Hodgkin and Huxley showed that the nerve impulse is a result of permeability changes of the nerve membrane. This provoked the question of what the molecular mechanisms of such permeability changes might be. In…