Introduction

Clay and I were both finishing a period of training at the National Institutes of Health in 1964, and we wanted to go to a laboratory that was attractive to both of us. With some apprehension, and a good deal of awe, we wrote to Professor Huxley. We were surprised and delighted when a very kind reply came back. We thus came to London for a period of two years, at a time when muscle research was very exciting indeed. Fred Julian was finishing his term there, and Hugo Gonzáles-Serratos was doing his “wavy fibrils” experiments.

Clay worked downstairs, initially on crab muscle and later on length-clamp experiments, and I worked upstairs, sharing the electron microscope with Lucy Brown. I was given the task of bringing crustacean muscle in line with the sliding-filament model. As Prof (as he was called) well knew, crustacean muscles offered all sorts of possibilities to the morphologist. Bob Eisenberg showed us how to dissect crab fibres. With Prof's advice and with friendly help and encouragement from Sally Page, these turned out to be very interesting. Prof was always happy to transfer some of his knowledge of optics, and several times suggested ingenious tricks to solve questions of magnification.