Andrew Fielding Huxley was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1963, together with A. L. Hodgkin and J. C. Eccles, for his contribution to understanding the process of nerve conduction. But by this time his research efforts had been redirected towards muscle contraction for some twelve years, and he had already played a major role in formulating the sliding-filament theory and in elucidating the first steps in the activation process. During these years and subsequently, he worked with a number of visitors to his laboratory, chiefly postdoctoral fellows from abroad. The opportunity for these collaborators to pay tribute to his influence on their work came at a conference associated with the meeting of the Physiological Society in Cambridge in June 1989. This marked no particular anniversary, though it preceded his retirement from his post as Master of Trinity College by a year. I asked him what kind of a meeting he would like, and he replied without hesitation, “On muscle.” So while this book does relatively little to celebrate his contributions to research on nerve, many of his past and present collaborators in muscle research were able to attend the conference and all of those contributed to this volume.

Robert Stämpfli's contribution (Chapter 1) does, however, recall the days in Cambridge and Plymouth when he witnessed the great work of Hodgkin, Huxley, and Katz on the squid giant axon, and collaborated with Huxley in demonstrating saltatory conduction in myelinated nerve. This contribution arose by a curious circumstance. I asked Professor Stämpfli at short notice whether he would be prepared to make a speech at the dinner after the meeting.