Introduction

Although it is often difficult and generally dangerous to try to identify the best piece of work or the most influential observation or the seminal result in a field of research, it is tempting to do so on this occasion. In order to make the task easier, I would prefer to list not one but a small group of contributions to the field of muscle biology, each devoted to a different aspect of the biology of the muscle cell. Few would question that A. V. Hill's (1938) paper on the energetics of muscle contraction belongs to this group of distinguished papers, and the separate but interrelated efforts of Ebashi and Weber to show that calcium ions were the activators of the contractile system have been equally important (Weber & Winicur, 1961; Ebashi, Ebashi, & Kodama, 1967). The introduction of electron microscopy to the study of muscle ultrastructure by H. E. Huxley in 1957 demonstrated the existence of two sets of interdigitating filaments and provided the ultrastructural basis for the basic mechanism of contraction. The remaining three developments that belong to this brief list of milestones to the understanding of muscle function were contributions of A. F. Huxley: (1) the constancy of the width of the Abands over a wide range of lengths of striated muscle (A. F. Huxley & Niedergerke, 1954, 1958), (2) the local activation of a very limited portion of a single muscle fibre by the localized depolarisation of the surface membrane (A. F. Huxley & Taylor, 1955b, 1958), and (3) the first comprehensive and quantitative theoretical model for the mechanism of contraction based on the existence of a large population of force generators (A. F. Huxley, 1957a).