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Abstract

THE announcement of the award - of the Nobel prize for medicine for 1922 to Prof. A. V. Hill and Prof. Otto Meyerhof, and for 1923 to Dr. Banting and Prof. Macleod, is gratifying to British research in medical science. The Toronto workers who discovered insulin share with workers at home a common inheritance of scientific tradition; their work has attracted much notice and is well known. The division of last year's prize between Prof. Hill and the professor of physiology at Kiel emphasises the friendly co-operation which has marked their work on muscular contraction since the investigations of Fletcher and Hopkins in 1908. Sir Walter Fletcher, now secretary of the Medical Research Council, was Prof. Hill's tutor at Cambridge and urged him to take up physiology. Work on muscle at that time awaited the elaboration of a new technique of investigation. It was Langley who suggested the line of approach which has since proved so productive in the hands of A. V. Hill, whose modification of the thermopile made possible the investigation of the total heat produced in a muscular contraction, of the time-relations of the heat-production, either “initial” or “recovery,” and of the thermal changes associated with the passive lengthening or shortening of the muscle. Oxygen is not used in the primary break-down processes of rest or activity, but only in what, strictly speaking, may be called the recovery processes. Prof. Hill has shown that but for the body's ability to meet its oxygen liabilities in arrears, it would not be possible to make more than the most moderate muscular effort. The muscle “goes into debt” for oxygen on the security of the lactic acid liberated in activity. Mechanical response is probably due to the production of lactic acid during contraction, its sudden appearance changing the electrical and colloidal state of protein interfaces in the muscle. Prof. Hill and his collaborators then passed to the consideration of the efficiency and speed of the recovery process, to the use of the “oxygen debt” as an indicator of the absolute amount of lactic acid present in the body at the end of exercise and to other problems of muscular exertion in man. Meyerhof continued in the use of the calorimetrical and chemical methods, his account of the role of lactic acid in contraction running parallel to A. V. Hill's. Muscle problems apart, Meyerhof, following Hopkins, has done notable work on the mechanism of oxidation; while A. V. Hill's work on blood-gases and on nervous excitation is also very widely known.