[2] Initially intending to earn a medical degree, Bezanilla shifted his focus to research and the Ph.D. program, finding that he liked how neurophysiology combined two of his interests, electronics and biology.
[3] He conducted research on the nerve cells of Humboldt squid at the Montemar Institute of Marine Biology.
[4] Leaving Chile for the United States in 1969, Bezanilla completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the National Institutes of Health.
[3] In experiments at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, Bezanilla and Armstrong built their own signal averaging device and became the first to measure the tiny gating currents in sodium channels.
[6] Some of his recent work includes the application of light pulses to gold nanoparticles to activate neurons.