PART I 

 MUSCLE 



A CHALLENGE TO BIOCHEMISTS 



by 



A. V. HILL 



Biophysics Research Unit, University College, London (England) 



Otto Meyerhof has always been betwixt and between : a physiological chemist or 

 a chemical physiologist, perhaps we should call him a "chemiologist". On my shelves 

 are about two hundred of his reprints, his and his colleagues'. The first of these, with 

 its accompanying letter addressing me as "Sehr geehrter Kerr Kollege" dated 1911 

 from Naples, dealt with the heat production of the vital oxidation process in the eggs 

 of marine animals. Next follow papers on the energy exchanges of bacteria, the heat 

 accompanying chemical processes in living cells, the inhibition of enzyme reactions by 

 narcotics (1914). Some time in those apparently peaceful years, before the explosion 

 of 1914, he visited us at Cambridge. Then comes a gap, so far at least as my collection 

 of Otto Meyerhof's reprints is concerned. By 1919 he had moved to Hober's laboratory 

 at Kiel and the long succession of papers began on the respiration, energetics, and 

 chemistry of muscle. And when I say muscle, I mean muscle: living muscle, resting, 

 contracting and recovering from contraction, developing tension and doing work, pro- 

 ducing lactic acid and removing it again, using oxygen and glycogen, giving out CO2 and 

 heat, all things which living muscles are accustomed to do. And since I too was working 

 on living muscle, we were in frequent communication again, after the five years' gap. 

 In the summer of 1922, following a suggestion to Hopkins, he visited Cambridge and 

 gave lectures there. I remember "Hoppy" expressing concern lest some anti-German 

 demonstration might take place, but appearing to be satisfied by the comment that if 

 so I should be proud to remove the demonstrator: nothing of course happened. Later, 

 he stayed with me at Manchester and I recall, as an example of his scientific perspicacity, 

 the complete disbelief which he, first of anyone, expressed in experiments he witnessed 

 which six months later were proved to be fraudulent. That was our first reunion after 

 the War, there were many others, in London, Plymouth, Barcelona, Heidelberg, Berlin, 

 Rome and elsewhere. The photograph shows us driving together to Stockholm for the 

 Physiological Congress in 1926. 



The results of his researches, and those of his colleagues, are a part of scientific 

 history. They are linked with most that is known of the chemistry of muscle and with 

 much that is established of changes involving phosphate and carbohydrate in the cell. 

 For some years his investigations were concerned mainly with muscle — living muscle : 

 more recently they followed the trend in biochemistry, perhaps even they helped to 

 establish the fashion, of dealing in vitro with the enzyme systems of muscle. As late, 

 however, as 1935, he was working on the volufhe changes of living muscle during 

 contraction and relaxation and relating them to the underlying chemical cause. I 

 read these papers again recently, very carefully, having come to the conclusion that the 



References p. 11. 4 



