Introduction

My first degree was in physics, but I became interested in the structure of biological macromolecules in my final year, and went on to do a Ph.D. in protein crystallography. I found it very frustrating having to wait for crystals to grow and decided to change to a research area where I could go into the laboratory in the morning and do a new experiment. The easiest option was to change to fibre diffraction, and muscle seemed a good thing to work on as its structure was less well worked out than many of the other fibrous proteins. However, somewhere along the way to securing a postdoctoral position, I was given an introduction to Andrew Huxley, then head of the Department of Physiology at University College London (UCL), who persuaded me to think seriously about a career in physiology. So I did an M.Sc. in Physiology at UCL and ended up doing a project in Prof's laboratory. My project was to investigate a recent report that the internal resistivity of muscle fibres changed during contraction (it didn't).

After that I joined Prof in his research on the mechanical properties of muscle fibres, taking over where Fred Julian had left off (see Chapter 2). It took several years to make the length step experiments on muscle fibres that led to the cross-bridge theory paper in 1971 (A. F. Huxley & Simmons, 1971b), and the really quantitative experiments were not done until Lincoln Ford arrived.