Adrian, Edgar Douglas (1889–1977) British Physiologist Edgar Douglas Adrian was born on November 30, 1889, in London to Alfred Douglas Adrian, a legal adviser to the British local government board. He went to school at Westminster School, London, and in 1908 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. At Cambridge University, he studied physiology, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1911.
In 1913 he entered Trinity College, studied medicine, did his clinical work at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, and received his M.D. in 1915. In 1929 he was elected Foulerton professor of the Royal Society, and in 1937 he became professor of physiology at the University of Cambridge until 1951, when he was elected master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was chancellor of the university from 1968 until two years before his death. He spent most of his research studying the physiology of the human nervous system, particularly the brain, and how neurons send messages. In 1932 he shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his work on the function of then neuron. He is considered one of the founders of modern neurophysiology. He wrote three books, The Basis of Sensation (1927), The Mechanism of Nervous Action (1932), and The Physical Basis ofm Perception (1947), and was knighted Baron of Cambridge in 1955. He died on August 4, 1977, and is buried at Trinity College.