Acta Physiologica 19. (1961)
1-4. szám - Szent-Györgyi A.: On Energy Transformation
ON ENERGY TRANSFORMATION By A. Szent-Györgyi INSTITUTE FOR MUSCLE RESEARCH AT THE MARINE BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY, WOODS HOLE, MASSACHUSSETTS, U.S.A. (Received November 15, 1960) When, at my laboratory at Szeged, actin was isolated, myosin crystallized, actomysin produced and made to contract under the influence of ions and ATP, there seemed to be no doubt that within a very short time we will really understand muscle contraction which could now be reproduced by more or less known substances in vitro. Subsequently I have worked for another ten years on muscle, and so have hundreds of researchers all over the world, but the understanding of muscle contraction has made no serious progress. This convinced me that there must be some very basic shortcoming in our general outlook which cuts the road to progress. Looking around I found that biochemistry could be divided into two chapters. In the one, biochemistry booked wonderful successes and still makes rapid progress, while in the other, biochemistry failed to lead into a better insight and is practically stagnant. The first one comprises problems like that of the pathways of intermediary metabolism, the structure of hormones, vitamins, etc., results which can be expressed with our classical chemical symbols, with letters and dashes, and reactions which can be repeated in homogeneous solutions. At the side of these problems there is, however, the other group of problems, like muscle contraction, nervous activity, secretions. These are the phenomena by which we know life from death. All of them are the reactions of complex, highly organized systems. They all include the transformation of energy, like the transformation of chemical energy into mechanical work (muscular contraction), or into electric work (nervous activity), or osmotic work (secretions). This indicated to me, that our ideas about energy and energy transformation are wrong or incomplete. I was taught, at school, that if two molecules collide and produce a reaction, the initial and final state of the system can be characterized by a difference in free energy, а Д F, and this Д F is the driving force of life. I never could make any sense out of this because two colliding molecules form a closed system and I could not understand how something happening in a closed system could drive anything outside. So, five years ago, I dropped muscle research altogether and have set out to find what is wrong in our biological outlook which is, at present, dominated by the molecular concept. I think