Cookies on this website

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you click 'Accept all cookies' we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies and you won't see this message again. If you click 'Reject all non-essential cookies' only necessary cookies providing core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility will be enabled. Click 'Find out more' for information on how to change your cookie settings.

Black and white formal portrait of Charles Sherrington.

On Tuesday 17 April 2018, the Department hosted the inaugural Charles Sherrington lecture. The talk, entitled "Neural Plasticity from Synapse to Cognition", was given by Professor Mu-ming Poo. See "Professor Mu-Ming Poo delivers inaugural Sir Charles Sherrington Lecture" for more information.

The Department was delighted to host a special Sherrington Prize Lecture (Public Understanding of Science) on Wednesday 7 November 2018The lecture entitled "What Price a Martian? Human Limits to Exploring the Red Planet" was given by Dr James Pawelczyk, Physiologist and Astronaut on the STS-90 Columbia Space Shuttle Mission in 1998. See "An astronaut's exciting journey" for more information.

The 2019 Charles Sherrington Lecture, "Synapses lost and found: Developmental critical periods and Alzheimer's disease", was given by Dr Carla J Shatz ForMemRS from the Department of Biology at Stanford Universityon Thursday 25 April. See "Dr Carla Shatz ForMemRS gives the 2019 Charles Sherrington Lecture" for more information.

The Department was delighted to host the second Sherrington Prize Lecture (Public Understanding of Science) on Tuesday 25 June 2019The lecture entitled "CRISPR Biology and Biotechnology: The Future of Genome Editing" was given by Dr Jennifer Doudna FRS, CRISPR pioneer, UC Berkeley Distinguished Professor and recipient of the prestigious Kavli Prize and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. See "Next generation of scientists meet CRISPR pioneer" for more information.

The 2020 Sherrington Prize Lectures, to be delivered by Sir Peter Gluckman ONZ KNZM FRSNZ FMedSci FRS from the University of Auckland (public understanding of science lecture) and Professor Thomas Südhof, MD ForMemRS Nobel Laureate from Stanford University, have both been postponed until further notice due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2021 Sherrington Prize Lecture, "Light Up the Brain", was delivered by our Waynflete Professor of Physiology Gero Miesenböck FRS, on Wednesday 23 June. Following the lecture, the new Sir Charles Sherrington plaque was unveiled. See "Gero Miesenböck FRS gives the 2021 Sherrington Prize Lecture ahead of Sherrington Plaque unveiling" for more information.

The Department was delighted to host the third Sherrington Prize Lecture (Public Understanding of Science) on Tuesday 16 November 2021The lecture entitled  "Experimenting in microgravity: Full circle for a scientist turned astronaut" was given by Dr Jessica U. Meir, Ph.D., NASA Astronaut and Physiologist who made history in 2019 by being part of the historic first all-female spacewalk. See "Dr Jessica Meir inspires the next generation of scientists and explorers" for more information.

The 2022 Sherrington Prize Lecture entitled "The cell-adhesion code that underlies the molecular logic of synapse formation" was delivered by Professor Thomas Südhof, MD ForMemRS Nobel Laureate from Stanford University School of Medicine on Friday 29 April 2022. See "Nobel Laureate Professor Thomas Südhof ForMemRS delivers 2022 Sherrington Prize Lecture" for more information.

The Department was delighted to host the fourth Sherrington Prize Lecture (Public Understanding of Science) on Friday 10 March 2023The lecture entitled "Thinking through epidemics" was given by Professor Sir Chris Whitty KCB FMedSci, the Chief Medical Officer for England. See "Professor Sir Chris Whitty brings greater understanding of epidemics to Oxford" for more information.

The 2023 Sherrington Prize Lecture entitled "Neuronal circuits for body movements" was delivered by Professor Silvia Arber from the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) and the Biozentrum, University of Basel on Tuesday 2 May 2023. See "Silvia Arber delivers 2023 Sherrington Prize Lecture" for more information.

biography

Sir Charles Scott Sherrington’s parentage and early childhood is vague. Official biographies record his birth as 27 November 1857 in Islington, London, to Dr James Sherrington and his wife Anne Thurtell; however other records suggest James Sherrington was an ironmonger who had died 9 years before Charles was born in Yarmouth.

Censuses from the time indicate that Sherrington was indeed born in 1857 but in the household of the widow Anne Sherrington and the surgeon Caleb Rose, who married after the death of Caleb’s wife in 1880.

During the 1860’s the family moved to Ipswich, where Sherrington was educated at Ipswich School. He was taught by the famous poet Thomas Ashe, who inspired in him a love of classics and a desire to travel. Since Rose was a noteworthy classical scholar and archaeologist, intellectuals frequently visited their family home, creating an environment that installed in Sherrington an academic sense of wonder.

Influenced by Rose, Sherrington began his medical studies at St Thomas’ Hospital in 1876. He then entered Cambridge as a non-collegiate student in 1879 but by the following year he had entered Gonville and Caius College. He studied at Cambridge under Sir Michael Foster, the so-called ‘father of British physiology’.

Sherrington earned his Membership of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1884, and in the following year obtained a First Class in the Natural Sciences Tripos with the mark of distinction and the degree of Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery from Cambridge.

During his time at Cambridge, Sherrington published his first paper, with John Newport Langley, regarding a controversy that had arisen at the Seventh International Medical Congress. At the conference Friedrich Goltz argued that the localized function in the cortex did not exist, based on his observation of dogs, whereas David Ferrier disagreed, based on his observation of a monkey who had suffered from hemiplegia. This work introduced Sherrington to Goltz, whom he later worked with at Strasbourg, and to the neurological work to which he devoted the rest of his life.

After his time at Cambridge, Sherrington traveled to Spain and Italy to study an outbreak of cholera. He examined the material he obtained in Berlin under Rudolf Virchow, who later sent him to Robert Koch for a course in technique, with whom he ended up staying for a year to conduct further research.

In 1891, Sherrington was appointed as superintendent of the Brown Institute for Advanced Physiological and Pathological Research of the University of London, and in 1885 was appointed as Holt Professor of Physiology at Liverpool.

Through his 1906 publication, "The Integrative Action of the Nervous System", Sherrington effectively laid to rest the theory that the nervous system, including the brain, can be understood as a single interlinking network. His alternative explanation of synaptic communication between neurons helped shape our understanding of the central nervous system.

In 1913, he came here to the Department in Oxford as the Waynflete Professor of Physiology; Charles was recommended for the chair unanimously without any other candidates being considered. He said of Oxford that its real function in the world “is to teach…what is not yet known”.

While at Oxford, Sherrington kept hundreds of microscope slides in a specially constructed box labelled "Sir Charles Sherrington’s Histology Demonstration Slides", which has been preserved and is kept in the department today.

Sherrington received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1932 with Edgar Adrian for their work on the functions of neurons. Prior to the work of Sherrington and Adrian, it was widely accepted that reflexes occurred as isolated activity within a reflex arc; instead Sherrington and Adrian showed that reflexes require integrated activation and demonstrated reciprocal innervation of muscles, a principle now known as Sherrington's Law. 

Sherrington married Ethel Mary Wright in 1891, with whom he had one child, Charles E.R. Sherrington, in 1897. He retired from Oxford in 1936, upon which he moved back to Ipswich where he built a house. He died suddenly of heart failure at the age of 94 on 4 March 1952.

list of speakers and talk titles

2023 - Professor Silvia Arber // Neuronal circuits for body movements

2023 - Professor Chris Whitty // Thinking through epidemics

2022 - Professor Thomas Südhof // The cell-adhesion code that underlies the molecular logic of synapse formation

2021 - Dr Jessica U. Meir // Experimenting in microgravity: Full circle for a scientist turned astronaut

2021 - Professor Gero Miesenböck // Lighting Up the Brain

2019 - Dr Jennifer Doudna // CRISPR Biology and Biotechnology: The Future of Genome Editing

2019 - Dr Carla J Shatz // Synapses lost and found: Developmental critical periods and Alzheimer’s disease

2018 - Dr James Pawelczyk // What Price a Martian? Human Limits to Exploring the Red Planet

2018 - Professor Mu-ming Poo // Neural Plasticity from Synapse to Cognition

Decorative Sherrington lecture 2018 posterDecorative Sherrington lecture 2018 (public understanding of science) posterDecorative Sherrington lecture 2019 posterDecorative Sherrington lecture 2019 (public understanding of science) posterSir Charles Sherrington Prize Lecture 2021 was entitled Lighting Up the brain delivered by Gero Miesebock FRS Waynflete Professor of Physiology, Director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at DPAG, University of Oxford.Poster detailing title and speaker affiliation - decorativeFramed poster of Sherrington Lecture 2022Sherrington Prize Lecture Public Understanding of Science 2023 posterSherrington Prize Lecture 2023 poster