Huxley, Hugh Esmor (1924– )

English physiologist who, using the electron microscope and thin slicing techniques, established the detailed structural basis of muscle contraction.

Huxley was born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, and studied at Cambridge. He returned to Cambridge as a lecturer 1961.

Muscle fibres contain a large number of longitudinally arranged myofibrils, which, Huxley demonstrated, are composed of thick and thin filaments of the proteins myosin and actin. He showed how the filaments are attached to one another in a woven pattern, and suggested that muscle contraction is brought about by sliding movements of two sets of filaments.

He discovered that the myosin filaments are able to aggregate under suitable conditions to form ‘artificial’ filaments of varying lengths. He proposed that the ‘tails’ of the myosin molecules become attached to each other to form a filament with the heads projecting from the body of the filament, and that this plays an important part in the sliding effect.

By coincidence, Andrew Huxley (no relation), working separately, came to the same conclusions at about the same time in the 1950s, although they disagree on the exact details.