Early life Born in
Bristol, the son of Jonathan Hill (1857–1924) and Ada Priscilla (née Rumney) (1861–1943), he was preceded on the paternal side by five generations of timber merchants at Bristol, carrying on the business which had been founded by James Hill in 1750. what came to be known as the Langmuir equation. This is closely related to
Michaelis–Menten kinetics. In this paper, Hill's first publication, he derived both the equilibrium form of the Langmuir equation, and also the exponential approach to equilibrium. The paper, written under the supervision of
John Newport Langley, is a landmark in the history of
receptor theory, because the context for the derivation was the binding of nicotine and curare to the "receptive substance" at the
neuromuscular junction.
Hill equation In 1910, Hill formulated the
Hill equation, which is used to quantify binding of
oxygen to
haemoglobin, written here as a kinetic equation: : v = V\frac{a^h}{K_{0.5}^h + a^h} Here v is the rate of reaction at concentration a of substrate, V is the rate at saturation, {K_{0.5}} is the value of a that gives v = 0.5 V, and the exponent h is a parameter that expresses the degree of departure from
Michaelis–Menten kinetics:
positive cooperativity for h>1, no cooperativity for h=1, and
negative cooperativity for h. Note that there is no implication that h is an integer, and in most experimental cases, apart from the trivial case of h=1, it is not. Although many authors use n or {n_\mathrm{H}} rather than h these symbols are misleading if taken to imply that it shows the number of binding sites on the
protein. Hill himself avoided any such interpretation. The equation can be rearranged as follows: : \ln [v/(V-v )] = h \ln a - h \ln K_{0.5} This shows that when the Hill equation is accurately obeyed a plot of \ln [v/(V-v)] gives a straight line of slope h. This is called a
Hill plot. In practice the line is usually not straight, and is curved at the extremes. To measure and compute he assembled the
Anti-Aircraft Experimental Section, a team of men too old for conscription,
Ralph H. Fowler (a wounded officer), and lads too young for service including
Douglas Hartree,
Arthur Milne and
James Crowther. Someone dubbed his motley group "Hill's Brigands", which they proudly adopted. Later in the war they also worked on locating enemy planes from their sound. He sped between their working sites on his beloved motorcycle. At the end of the war, Major Hill issued certificates to more than one hundred Brigands. He was appointed an
Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). Hill introduced the concepts of
maximal oxygen uptake and oxygen debt in 1922. In 1923, he succeeded
Ernest Starling as professor of physiology at
University College London, a few years later becoming a Royal Society Research professor there, where he remained until retirement in 1951. In 1933, he became with
William Beveridge and
Lord Rutherford a founder member and vice-president of the
Academic Assistance Council (which in 1936 became the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning). By the start of the
Second World War, the organisation had saved 900 academics (18 of whom went on to win Nobel Prizes) from
Nazi persecution. He prominently displayed in his laboratory a toy figure of Adolf Hitler with saluting arm upraised, which he explained was in gratitude for all the scientists Germany had expelled, some of whom were now working with him. Hill believed that "Laughter is the best detergent for nonsense".
World War II service In 1935, he served with
Patrick Blackett and Sir
Henry Tizard on the committee that gave birth to
radar. He was also biological secretary of the Royal Society;
William Henry Bragg was president. Both had been frustrated by the delay in putting scientists to work in the previous war. The Royal Society collated a list of scientists and Hill represented the Society at the Ministry of Labour. When the war came Hill led a campaign to liberate refugee scientists who had been interned. He served as an
independent Member of Parliament (MP) for
Cambridge University from 1940 to 1945. In 1940, he was posted to the British Embassy in Washington to promote war research in the still neutral United States. There he was authorised to swap secrets with U.S. officials and persuaded the British to show the Americans everything they were working on (except for the atomic bomb). The mobilization of Allied scientists was one of the major successes in the war. He visited India between November 1943 and April 1944 to survey scientific and technological research. His suggestions influenced the establishment of the
Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in the following decade.
Later life After the war he rebuilt his laboratory at University College and vigorously carried on research. In 1951, his advocacy was rewarded by the establishment of a Biophysics Department under his leadership. In 1952, he became head of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science and Secretary General of the
International Council of Scientific Unions. He was President of the
Marine Biological Association from 1955 to 1960. In 1967, he retired to Cambridge where he gradually lost the use of his legs. He died "held in the greatest affection by more than a hundred scientific descendants all over the world". == Honors and awards ==