Process of muscle contractions remains mystery to scientists
Process of muscle contractions remains mystery to scientists
When a dog wags its tail, a baby toddles across the floor, or you scratch your nose, the process is more complex than the workings of a hydrogen bomb. All are examples of muscular contraction so common place and yet so mysterious that it has baffled the most gifted scientists.
Writing of the “miracle of muscle” in a recent Reader’s Digest, J. D. Ratcliff says that more than half the luiman body is muscle. From birth to death, muscle plays a critical role in all we do.
We speak of “muscles of iron.”
Yet the working element in muscle is a soft jelly. How this jelly contracts to lift 1,000 times its own weight is one of the miracles of the universe.
There are three types of human muscle: the muscles of motion such as those which propel us when we walk’; the “smooth” muscles which control such involuntary actions as digestion; and the type of muscle found in the heart. All types are “startlingly efficient machines,” says Reader’s Digest, for converting chemical energy (food) into mechanical energy (work). Muscle process unexplained
No book of the hundreds written on muscle has ever explained fully the process by which muscle contractshow you wiggle a toe. Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Prizewinner and authority on muscle, has come close to creating “living” tissue in the laboratory by mixing muscle proteins and adding a droplet of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a
substance which is the body’s “engine” for muscle. At the touch of ATP a violent contraction of the muscle proteins occurred. Yet this scientist is the first to admit that “We have the picture of this deep and puzzling mystery in merest outline.”
Experiments like Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi’s may open a new frontier of attack on some of mankind’s greatest ills, the* Digest says, and may even lead to longer life. The article adds that muscles should be exercised, but they should be rested too. One should not wait until they are weakened before giving the care and consideration they deserve. For, to a great degree, we are what our muscles make ussick or well, vigorous or droopy, alive or dead.
