Archibald Hill
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Archibald Vivian Hill
British physiologist and biochemist (1886–1977)
Born at Bristol, Hill was professor of physiology at Manchester University (1920–23) and then Jodrell Professor at University College, London, from 1923 to 1925 (and honorary professor from 1926 to 1951). He was Foulerton Research Professor of the Royal Society (1926–51), of which he was also for some years both secretary and foreign secretary. From 1940 until 1946 he was the Independent Conservative member of Parliament for Cambridge University and a member of the War Cabinet Scientific Advisory Committee.
Hill's major research was directed toward accurately recording the minute quantities of heat produced during muscle action. For this he used thermocouples, which recorded the smallest variations in heat generated after the muscle had completed its movement. He was able to show that oxygen was only consumed after muscular contraction, and not during it, indicating that molecular oxygen is required only for muscle recovery. In 1922 he shared the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine (with Otto Meyerhof) for this work on the physiology of muscular contraction.
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Sir Archibald Vivian hill
(1886-1972) British physiologist; pioneer of muscle biochemistry; Nobel Prize 1922.
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Archibald Vivian Hill
English physiologist Archibald Vivian Hill (1886-1977) shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1922) for his discoveries relating to the production of heat in muscles.
The son of a timber merchant, A (rchibald) V (ivan) Hill was born in Bristol, England, on Sept. 26, 1886. In 1904 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, to begin a brilliant career, first in mathematics, then in physiology, in which he obtained a first-class honors degree in 1909.
From 1909 until World War I broke out in 1914, Hill did research work in the Physiological Laboratory at Cambridge. Advised to investigate "the efficiency of cut-out frog's muscle as a thermodynamic machine, " this would become Hill's life work. During the war he was director of an official group of scientists who produced revolutionary recommendations on antiaircraft gunsights. In 1920 Hill became Brackenbury professor of physiology in the University of Manchester and in 1923 Jodrell professor of physiology at University College, London. Two years later he was appointed as the Royal Society's Foulerton Research Professor in biophysics at University College. He retired from this chair in 1956 but continued to work in the physiology department.
Early Investigations in Muscle Physiology
Following the suggestion of English physiologist J.N. Langley, Hill began research into the production of heat by a contracting muscle. Practically all that was known at the time was that the total energy involved in contraction of a muscle, that is, the sum of the work done and the heat evolved, was related to the length of the muscle and to the load. But in a single muscle twitch, the heat evolved does not exceed 0.003 ° C, and the available instruments could not measure such small amounts. The successive events in a muscle contraction are all chemical reactions, but these cannot be analyzed immediately after they occur, and chemistry can give only the end result. The physical changes can be measured as soon as they occur - hence the emphasis on heat production.
Using a strap-like thigh muscle in the frog, Hill demonstrated that oxygen is needed not for the contractile phase of muscular activity but only for the recovery phase. This led to the discovery of the numerous biochemical reactions that occur in muscle cells and result in contraction.
Hill's studies of the heat in muscle contraction continued through the years. There was no early chemical proof of his deductions, but they were confirmed chemically by Otto Meyerhof in 1920.
Hill wrote many of his papers in collaboration with William Hartree, who worked in Hill's laboratory. Shortly after the war, Hill found a sudden, large production of heat at the onset of contraction and another during relaxation. In 1920, with Hartree, he discovered that, with muscles in nitrogen, there was indeed a smaller heat production during the three minutes following the stimulus. In 1922 they wrote a standard paper on recovery heat, in which they gave the first clear description of the characteristics of this "anaerobic delayed heat" (a.d.h.) found in muscles in nitrogen. In 1923 they gave its value as about 0.25 of the initial heat. The explanation of the a.d.h. had to await the further chemical work of Meyerhof and others. In 1922 Hill shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Meyerhof.
More Theories and Publications
During World War II, Hill's laboratory was closed, and he held important public and advisory offices, such as chairman of the Executive Committee of the National Physical Laboratory, Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge, and member of the War Cabinet Scientific Advisory Committee. He also visited India as a consultant to the Indian government on scientific matters.
Hill returned to experimental work after the war and published numerous important papers. He also derived his "Hill equation, " a mathematical expression for the uptake of oxygen by hemoglobin.
In 1967 Hill stopped all experimental work and moved to Cambridge. His last book First and Last Experiments in Muscle Mechanics (1970) contains the results of his difficult experimental and mathematical investigations.
For many years Hill carried out experiments on muscular activity in trained athletes. In 1922 he introduced the fruitful conception of the "oxygen debt, " which explains how a person can for a short period produce without exhaustion far larger quantities of lactic acid than the maximum oxygen intake can oxidize at the time. In many experiments Hill found that the maximum speed in running was usually reached in 30 to 50 yards; it then began to decline. In 1925 Hill was the first to plot speed against distance for world running records. In 1928 he studied the effects of different winds on running, and he later investigated the force-velocity relationship in human muscle.
Hill's important books include: Muscular Activity (1926), Muscular Movement in Man (1927), Chemical Wave Transmission in Nerve (1932), and Trails and Trials in Physiology (1965). Trails and Trials, although nominally an annotated and classified bibliography of his own scientific papers and those of his coworkers, contains critical discussions of his work and that of others.
Honors
Hill received many honors in addition to his Nobel Prize. He became an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1918 and a Companion of Honour in 1946. In 1918 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, of which he was Biological Secretary (1935-1945) and Foreign Secretary (1945-1946). He was awarded its Royal Medal in 1926 and its highest honor, the Copley Medal, in 1948. He received honorary degrees from 17 universities and was elected to many foreign scientific societies. He was an Honorary Fellow of both King's College (1927) and Trinity College (1941), Cambridge, and an Honorary Fellow of University College, London (1948). In the early 1930s he was a founding member of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, established to assist foreign scholars suffering under Nazi oppression, and later its president. A.V. Hill died in Cambridge on June 3, 1977.
Further Reading
There is a biography of Hill in Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine, 1922-1941 (1965), which also contains his Nobel Lecture. For Hill's later work see his Trails and Trials in Physiology (1965). For the general background of muscle physiology see G. H. Bourne, ed., The Structure and Function of Muscle, vol. 2 (1960).
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Archibald Hill
| A. V. Hill | |
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| Born | 26 September 1886 Bristol, England |
| Died | 3 June 1977 (aged 90) Cambridge, England |
| Nationality | United Kingdom |
| Fields | Physiology and biophysics |
| Institutions | Cambridge University University of Manchester University College, London |
| Alma mater | Cambridge University |
| Doctoral advisor | Walter Morley Fletcher |
| Doctoral students | Bernard C. Abbott Te-Pei Feng Ralph H. Fowler Bernard Katz |
| Known for | Mechanical work in muscles Muscle contraction model Founding biophysics Hill equation (biochemistry) |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1922) |
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Notes
He is notably the father of Polly Hill, David Keynes Hill, Maurice Hill, and the grandfather of Nicholas Humphrey. |
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A. V. Hill, christened Archibald Vivian (which names he detested) CH OBE FRS[1] (26 September 1886 – 3 June 1977) was an English physiologist, one of the founders of the diverse disciplines of biophysics and operations research. He shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his elucidation of the production of heat and mechanical work in muscles.[2][3]
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Biography
Born in Bristol, he was educated at Blundell's School and graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge as third wrangler in the mathematics tripos before turning to physiology. His early work involved the characterization of what came to be known as Michaelis-Menten kinetics and the use of the Hill coefficient. Hill's first paper, published in 1909[4] while working under the supervision of John Newport Langley, is a landmark in the history of receptor theory.
Hill made many exacting measurements of the physics of nerves and muscles. His earliest experiments on the heat production of contracting muscles used equipment obtained from the Swedish physiologist Magnus Blix. Both before and after World War I he worked on a range of topics in physiology in cooperation with colleagues in Cambridge, Germany and elsewhere.
Hill is regarded, along with Hermann Helmholtz, as one of the founders of biophysics.
In 1913 he married Margaret Keynes, daughter of the economist John Neville Keynes, and sister of the economist John Maynard Keynes and the surgeon Geoffrey Keynes. They had two sons and two daughters:
- Polly Hill (1914–2005), economist, married K.A.C. Humphreys, registrar of the West African Examinations Council.
- David Keynes Hill (1915–2002), physiologist
- Maurice Hill (1919–1966), oceanographer
- Janet Hill (1918–2000) child psychiatrist, married the immunologist John Herbert Humphrey.
In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Hill joined the British army and assembled a team working on ballistics and operations research. The team included many notable physicists including Ralph H. Fowler, Douglas Hartree and Arthur Milne.
Hill returned to Cambridge in 1919 before taking the chair in physiology at the Victoria University of Manchester in 1920. Parallelling the work of German Otto Fritz Meyerhof he elucidated the processes whereby mechanical work is produced in muscles. The two shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for this work.
In 1923 he succeeded Ernest Starling as professor of physiology at University College, London, a post he held until his retirement in 1951. He was President of the Marine Biological Association from 1955 to 1960. He continued work as an active researcher until 1966.
World War II saw the beginning of Hill's extensive public service. Already in 1935 he was working with Patrick Blackett and Sir Henry Tizard on the committee that gave birth to Radar. In 1933, he became with Lord Beveridge and Lord Rutherford a founder member and vice-president of the Academic Assistance Council (which became the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning in 1936). By the start of the Second World War, the organization had saved 900 academics (18 of whom went on to win Nobel Prizes) from the Nazi persecution. He served as an independent Member of Parliament (MP) for Cambridge University from 1940 to 1945. He took part in many scientific missions to the U.S.
Honours and awards
- Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1918)
- Fellow of the Royal Society (1918)
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1922)
- Companion of Honour (1946)
- Copley Medal of the Royal Society (1948)
References
- ^ Katz, B. (1978). "Archibald Vivian Hill. 26 September 1886-3 June 1977". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 24: 71–149. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1978.0005. JSTOR 769758. PMID 11615743.
- ^ . doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.01246.2001 (inactive 1 January 2012). http://jap.physiology.org/content/93/5/1567.
- ^ The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31230.
- ^ Hill, A. V. (1909). "The mode of action of nicotine and curari, determined by the form of the contraction curve and the method of temperature coefficients". The Journal of physiology 39 (5): 361–373. PMC 1533665. PMID 16992989. //www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1533665.
Publications
By Hill:
- Gray, C. H. (1947). "The significance of the van den Bergh reaction". The Quarterly journal of medicine 16 (63): 135–142. PMID 20263725.
- Hill, A. V.; Long, C. N. H.; Lupton, H. (1924). "Muscular Exercise, Lactic Acid, and the Supply and Utilisation of Oxygen". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 96 (679): 438. doi:10.1098/rspb.1924.0037.
- Hill, A.V. (1924-5). Textbook of Anti-Aircraft Gunnery, 2 vols
- - (1926). "The scientific study of athletics". Scientific American 224 (April).
- - (1926a). Muscular Activity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0-8493-5494-3.
- - (1926b). Muscular Activity: Herter Lectures - Sixteenth Course. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Company.
- - (1927a). Muscular Movement in Man
- - (1927b). Living Machinery
- Hill, A. V. (1928). "Myothermic apparatus". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 103 (723): 117. doi:10.1098/rspb.1928.0029.
- - (1931). Adventures in Biophysics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- - (1932) Chemical Wave Transmission in Nerve
- - (1960). The Ethical Dilemma of Science, and Other Writings. New York: Rockefeller Institute Press,.
- - (1965). Trails and Trials in Physiology: A Bibliography, 1909-1964; with reviews of certain topics and methods and a reconnaissance for further research. London: Arnold.
Further reading
- Lusk, G. (1925). Lectures on nutrition: 1924-1925. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company.
- Stevenson, L.G. (1953). Nobel Prize Winners in Medicine and Physiology: 1901-1950.. New York: Henry Schuman.
- Nobel biography
| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
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| Preceded by Sir Kenneth Pickthorn, Bt. Sir John James Withers |
Member of Parliament for Cambridge University 1940 – 1945 With: Sir Kenneth Pickthorn, Bt. |
Succeeded by Sir Kenneth Pickthorn, Bt. Wilson Harris |
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Mentioned in
Otto Fritz Meyerhof
(German–American biochemist)
Archibald Vivian Hill
(British physician)
Bernard Katz
(German–British neurophysiologist)
Year 1922
(in Science & Technology)
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