No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Archibald Vivian Hill , universally known as A.V., was a major figure in twentieth-century physiology and biophysics. His life's work was largely in the thermodynamics of muscle contraction, for which he shared with Otto Meyerhof the Nobel Prize for 1922. He also made important contributions in neurophysiology (excitation and heat production) and in applied physiology. He was a pioneer in the application of mathematics and physical chemistry to biology, designed many new biophysical instruments, and developed countless innovations in experimental technique. He trained many of Britain's next generation of biophysicists. His students and collaborators, at Cambridge and at University College, London, number over 200, including such subsequent Nobelists as Herbert Gasser and Bernard Katz. For over sixty years he was active in scientific organizations -the Physiological Society, the Royal Society of London, and the International Union of Physiological Sciences, among others.
Scientific expertise led him into positions of national prominence. He directed research in antiaircraft gunnery during World War I, and organized scientific manpower in World War II. During the 1930's he led the British effort to find new positions for Jewish academics driven out of Germany. He was a scientific liaison officer to the United States, and later scientific advisor to India. And for five years duringthe second war, he served as a Member of Parliament for Cambridge University.
All these facets of Hill's life are reflected in the large collection of his papers recerltly deposited in the Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. In this brief synopsis of their contents, I shall confine myself to items of interest to historians of the biological sciences.
These sixteen bound volumes contain all of Hill's published scientific papers, largely from the Journal of Physiology and the Proceedings of the Royal Society, B, as well as those papers of his coworkers and students carried out under his direct supervision. The best key to his
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A progress report is given for the various components of the STAR detector system. We report on the recent developments in the detector proto-typing and construction, with an emphasis on the main TPC, recent TPC cosmic ray testing and shipping to Brookhaven National Laboratory