Here, you will uncover historical information about the society. Enjoy these nuggets curated by John Challis, our Archives Officer.
Traditionally the first presentation at each ISB Congress is the Wartenweiler Memorial Lecture. This lecture is named after Jurg Wartenweiler (1915-1976), the first president of the ISB. When the congress was first held in Calgary in 1999 (Congress XVII), the Wartenweiler Memorial Lecture was delivered by Andrew Huxley. In 1963 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Alan Hodgkin and John Eccles, for their work on the mechanisms associated with the excitation and inhibition of the nerve cell membrane. This work was predominantly conducted in the late 1940s and early 1950s, after which he turned his attention to understanding the production of muscle force. His work on muscle produced many important insights (e.g., Huxley & Niedergerke, 1954; Huxley, 1957; Gordon, Huxley, & Julian, 1966). It was his work on muscle which was the focus of his Wartenweiler Memorial Lecture. The lecture can be viewed on YouTube (click here). The content of this lecture was subsequently published in the Journal of Biomechanics (Huxley, 2000); a paper which was one of the last of his over half a century of publishing.
When Huxley was performing his work on nerve excitation, only a few universities had a computer. If a university had a computer, they only had one on which users would share time. These computers were typically the size of a small room, but by the end of his career nearly every member of a university had a computer on their desk. When Huxley wanted to perform simulations of nerve excitation his plan was to use the computer at the University of Cambridge, but as his collaborator Alan Hodgkin explains this ended up not being feasible. Hodgkin (1992) described the computation process required for some of their work resulting in their Nobel prize, in particular that work reported in Hodgkin and Huxley (1952),
“We had settled all the equations and constants by March 1951 and hoped to get these solved on the Cambridge University computer. However, before anything could be done we heard that the computer could be off the air for six months or so, while it underwent a major modification. Andrew Huxley got us out of that difficulty by solving the differential equations numerically using a hand-operated Brunsviga calculating machine. The propagated action potential took about three weeks to compute and must have been an enormous labour for Andrew.” (page 291)
In the Brunsviga calculator, see picture above, when numbers were multiplied they were entered by sliding levers to produce one of the numbers (e.g., 123), and then if, for example, multiplying by 789 the carriage position was first moved to the “ones” and then the crank rotated nine times, then the carriage was moved to the “tens” and the crank rotated eight times, before finally selecting the “hundreds” and cranking the handle seven times. Crank the handle one way and you could achieve addition or multiplication, the other way subtraction or division. Even the product of two three digit numbers required multiple steps. The complexity of the operations that Huxley was performing is hard to imagine as he was integrating a differential equation with multiple parameters and variables. His results were later confirmed using computers (e.g., Cooley and Dodge, 1966; note this is the Cooley who developed the Fast Fourier Transform: Cooley and Tukey, 1965). Huxley’s diligence in performing these calculations in such a complex and time-consuming way, possibly offers a glimpse into one of the factors contributing to his long and prestigious career.
References
Cooley, J. W., & Dodge, F. A., Jr. (1966). Digital computer solutions for excitation and propagation of the nerve impulse. Biophysics Journal, 6(5), 583-599.
Cooley, J. W., & Tukey, J. W. (1965). An algorithm for the machine calculation of complex Fourier series. Maths of Computation, 19, 297-301.
Gordon, A. M., Huxley, A. F., & Julian, F. J. (1966). The variation in isometric tension with sarcomere length in vertebrate muscle fibres. Journal of Physiology, 184(1), 170-192.
Hodgkin, A. L. (1992). Chance & Design: Reminiscences of Science in Peace and War. Cambridge England ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Hodgkin, A. L., & Huxley, A. F. (1952). A quantitative description of membrane current and its application to conduction and excitation in nerve. Journal of Physiology, 117(4), 500-544.
Huxley, A. F. (1957). Muscle structure and theories of contraction. Progress in Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry, 7, 257-318.
Huxley, A. F., & Niedergerke, R. (1954). Structural changes in muscle during contraction; interference microscopy of living muscle fibres. Nature, 173(4412), 971-973.
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