ABSTRACT
A neurophysiologist, Lord Edgar Douglas Adrian shared the Nobel Prize for 1932 for his description and analysis of the functioning of the neurons in stimulation of muscle and sense organs, extending and illuminating the earlier discoveries of his colaureate, Sir Charles Scott Sherrington. He was educated at the Westminster School in London, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1908 with a science scholarship. In 1926 Adrian published his first observations on the response of the sensory end organ to various natural stimuli. Adrian showed that a constant stimulus results in immediate excitement of the end organ, followed by a gradual decrease. Adrian’s isolation of the individual impulses into functional components clarified earlier findings by Sherrington and others. Adrian was active as well in international affairs, working on several committees of the World Health Organization, most notably in 1961, to study the effects of atomic radiation on the future of mankind.
