His grandfather Thomas Huxley was a noted 19th-century biologist and early proponent of evolutionary theory. Julian Huxley, a pioneer in the field of animal behavior, and Aldous Huxley, the author of “Brave New World” and other works, were half brothers from his father’s first marriage.

Professor Huxley said his famous siblings had little influence on him when he was growing up; in fact, he said, they seemed more like uncles than brothers because of the age differences: Julian was 30 and Aldous was 23 when Andrew was born. He credited his technical gifts to his mother, who encouraged woodworking and was good with her hands.

When Professor Huxley was 14, his parents gave him a lathe, which he used to build wooden candlesticks, and a working internal combustion engine. (He kept the candlesticks all his life.) He later used the lathe to build apparatuses for his experiments, including those that led to the Nobel.

His father died when he was 15. His mother, recognizing her son’s mechanical talent, encouraged Professor Huxley to study physics; in 1935, he entered Cambridge University with plans to become an engineer. But he switched his focus to physiology after taking the subject to fulfill an elective.

He received his bachelor’s degree in 1938 and his master’s in 1945. During the summer of 1939 he joined Professor Hodgkin, who was one of his teachers, at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Plymouth, England, to begin their studies with the squid axon. But they were forced to put their work aside after World War II broke out that September with Germany’s invasion of Poland.

Professor Huxley, recruited by the British Anti-Aircraft Command, worked on developing radar control of antiaircraft guns. Later he was transferred to the Admiralty, where he did the same work for naval gunnery. The wartime research sharpened his already considerable mathematical skills, preparing him for his later success in devising the equations that explained the electrical conductivity of nerves.

Professor Huxley resumed his collaboration with Professor Hodgkin in 1946, and they published their findings in 1952. Two decades later, the German physiologists Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann obtained the first recording of the small electric currents that pass through ion gates — a discovery that proved the existence of ion channels and earned the 1991 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.