Nobel Laureate A. V. Hill and the refugee scholars, 1933-1945.

Abstract

A. V. Hill shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his investigation of the energetics of muscular contraction. His scientific work has been well chronicled over many years (Rall JA. Mechanism of Muscular Contraction, 2014). There is the natural tendency to focus solely on an investigator's scientific achievements. But in the case of Hill, it has been said (Katz B. Biogr Mem Fellows R Soc 24: 71-149, 1978) that "it was his devotion to such wider issues, outside the boundaries of his own research, through which he exerted his most important influence on other people's lives and on the course of events." It is A. V. Hill, the man, and his defense of science and of scientists driven from their places of work, which began with the Nazi rise to power in Germany in 1933, that will be explored.