Rolf Niedergerke was encouraged to join A.F. Huxley in Cambridge University by Stämpfli, who had been a close associate of Huxley on nerve potential. Since 1951 Huxley was looking for a competent researcher for investigating the striation pattern of living
skeletal muscle. Niedergerke moved to England in the autumn of 1952 as a
George Henry Lewes Student with additional support from
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. He was a good choice because his personal interest had been on skeletal muscle and had a good collection on the subject since his time in Göttingen. He worked using Huxley's own
interference microscope. Within a year he helped to improve the technique and a research paper on the mechanism of muscle contraction was ready. At that moment almost the same observation was made by Hugh Huxley and Jean Hanson at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Authored in pairs their papers were simultaneously published in the 22 May 1954 issue of
Nature. Their conclusion states that the observation: This was the discovery of "Sliding Filament Theory", the first scientific evidence and the basis of modern understanding of muscle contraction. Contrary to scientific view of the time they found that the muscle as a whole do not contract of expand, but it was individual group of the muscle fibres (called I or light bands), while other fibres (A or dark bands) are never changed. The very "hypothesis" was experimentally proved in 1966. Niedergerke moved from Cambridge to London in 1955, joining the Biophysics Department at University College London. Taking the suggestion of
Bernard Katz, he continued his study on
cardiac muscle (a specialised muscle of the heart), on which he discovered the role of
calcium in muscle contraction (often dubbed the "calcium story") He retired from UCL in 1987. ==Death==