The purpose of this study was to evaluate the limitations of the double sucrose gap voltage clamp technique in the determination of tension-voltage relationships for frog atrial muscle. Tension-voltage relationships were determined under two conditions. In one case we determined both the tension response and slow inward current associated with an apparent step depolarization (step-clamp) as a f...

when we were both living in Trinity College, Cambridge. He finished as an undergraduate in 1935 and was a research scholar and, from 1936, a Junior Research Fellow; I came up as an undergraduate in 1935. In the summer of 1939, he went to the marine laboratory at Plymouth to do experiments on the giant nerve fibres of squid. He invited me to join him, which I did at the beginning of August; we l...

The voltage-clamp technique is applicable only to spherical cells. In nonspherical cells, such as neurons, the membrane potential is not clamped distal to the voltage-clamp electrode. This means that the current recorded by the voltage-clamp electrode is the sum of the local current and of axial currents from locations experiencing different membrane potentials. Furthermore, voltage-gated curre...