In 1929, Eccles received a D. Phil. degree from Oxford for a thesis on excitation and inhibition.
Eccles's Main Scientific Discovery
Eccles's major scientific achievement was the identification of the membrane potential changes underlying synaptic transmission in the central nervous system. These studies began at Oxford with analyses of simpler synaptic systems such as the cat nictitating membrane, the cervical sympathetic ganglia, and the neuromuscular junction and continued with spinal cord and supraspinal synapses. In 1937, Eccles moved to Sydney, where he set up a physiological laboratory in the Sydney Hospital and where he and W. J. O'Connor (1939) discovered and named the end-plate potential, the immediate electrical muscle cell response to the nerve impulse. In the early 1940s Eccles was joined by two distinguished scholars, Bernard Katz and Stephen Kuffler, who came to Australia as refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and Nazi occupation of Austria, respectively. Together they analyzed the properties of the end-plate potential (Eccles, Katz, and Kuffler, 1941, 1942), and Kuffler made his classical report on the effect of curare (Kuffler, 1942).
The Electrical-Chemical Synaptic Transmission Controversy
Between 1933 and 1938, Eccles made a set of studies on synaptic transmission through the cervical sympathetic ganglion and identified a fast and a slower type of transmission.
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