Alexander Ludwig von Muralt

Alexander Ludwig von Muralt (August 19, 1903 – May 28, 1990) was a Swiss physiologist who studied the biochemistry of muscles and nerve signals. He studied physics before moving into medicine and worked at Harvard University and the University of Bern. He made use of optical anisotropy measurements in the study of nerve and muscle functioning.

Ludwig came from the Muralt family of Locarno who had moved to Zurich in 1555. His father Ludwig von Muralt and his mother Florence Watson where both physicians working on psychiatry in the University of Zurich. His mother was from Philadelphia and had moved to Switzerland to work with Eugen Bleuler. After the birth of Ludwig, his father developed tuberculosis and he moved to the sanatorium of Davos-Dorf where he shifted interest from psychiatry to lung disease. After the death of his father in 1917, his mother moved back to Zurich where Ludwig went to study. Although interested in medicine he found physics and mathematics fascinating, and was particularly fascinated by the lectures of Erwin Schrödinger. His doctoral thesis in 1927 was in physics, a study of the limits of Hehl's law of glow discharge. After receiving his PhD in 1928 he married Alice Baumann and moved to Harvard Medical School with a Rockefeller grant. He worked on protein structure with Edwin J. Cohn. Using refraction experiments they tried to study actin and myosin structure. He was offered a position at Harvard but he moved to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute under Otto Meyerhof in Heidelberg. Here he completed an MD degree. Meyerhof and A.V. Hill had studied the formation of lactic acid from glycogen and in 1930 Einar Lundsgaard had shown muscle contractions without the production of lactic acid when treated with iodoacetate. Ludwig worked on using light scattering in muscles to study anaerobic contractions and received an MD summa cum laude, in 1932. In 1935 he moved to the University of Bern. He wrote a textbook Practical Physiology (1943). During World War II he joined the Swiss army and at the end of the war he had the rank of Colonel. He continued work in Bern with studies on nerve fibres. Along with Robert Stampfli and Andrew Huxley they recognized saltatory excitation. He wrote two books Signalibermittlung in Nerven (1946) and Neue Ergebnisse der Nervenphysiologie (1958). He received the Marcel Benoist prize in 1946 for his work on nerve signal transmission. He then became involved in the Swiss National Science Foundation founded in 1952 as well as directed the High Altitude Research Station at Jungfraujoch (3475 meters above sea level). He retired in 1968 but continued to be interested in research and was particularly interested in the studies on the neurons of squid done by Richard Keynes and Larry Cohen at Plymouth.