Glory Days: Establishment of the Sliding Filament Model of Muscular Contraction in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

The late 1950s and the 1960s turned out to be the ``glory days'' for the sliding filament model of muscle contraction. But these years started with a mixed reception to the sliding filament model. There were at least two issues that required careful further consideration. The first issue related to dogma and the criticism by Albert Szent-Gyorgyi that it had not been proven that myosin was located only in the A band. The dogma was that myosin was distributed throughout the sarcomere and that the filaments folded on muscle shortening. The second and more fundamental problem was that neither light microscopy nor Hugh Huxley's electron micrographs from longitudinal muscle sections were good enough to trace a single thin filament from the Z line into the A band where it was presumed to overlap with the thick filaments.