50-Year Anniversary of Sliding Filament

In this issue of the Journal we mark a milestone in physiology, the 50th anniversary of the publication in Nature on May 22, 1954 of two papers (Huxley, A.F., and R. Niedergerke. 1954. Structural changes in muscle during contraction; interference microscopy of living muscle fibers. Nature. 173:971–973; Huxley, H., and J. Hanson. 1954. Changes in the cross-striations of muscle during contraction and stretch and their structural interpretation. Nature. 173:973–976) which formulated the sliding filament hypothesis of muscle contraction. Two historical reviews remind us of the significance this early work. One, by Andrew Szent-Györgyi of Brandeis University, describes the struggles that established the biochemistry of actin and myosin and how this knowledge was meshed into the sliding filament hypothesis. The other, by Roger Cooke of the University of California, San Francisco, describes how this knowledge has become the basis for atomic models of muscle contraction....