Croonian Lecture - On the structure of biological fibres and the problem of muscle

Abstract

The least original way of beginning the Croonian Lecture, yet quite the best with regard to our subject to-day, is to quote again the original terms of reference. The founder directed that it should be ‘of the Nature and Property of Local Motion and the application of the Doctrine thereof to explicate the causes and reasons of the Phenomena’. In the long passage of time since the Lecture was founded we inevitably turn more and more to the nature and property of local motion of the molecules of biological structures, till now, in fact, this concern with the molecular basis of things has become biology’s most noticeable feature. It is a sign of the times that a physicist should be invited to deliver this famous biological lecture and that he should propose to talk about the nature and property of local motion of the working molecules of the muscle structure. I want to do something more than that, though; I want to try to set the muscle story in its appropriate place in the wider scheme of biological fibres in general.