Receptive substance

J. N. Langley maintained an interest in the action of plant alkaloids throughout his fife. Through his work with nicotine (which can contract skeletal muscle) and curare (which abolishes this action of nicotine and also blocks the response of the muscle to nerve stimulation, as first shown by Claude Bernard), he was able to infer in 1905 that the muscle must possess a receptive substance ... 

Since this accessory substance is the recipient of stimuli which it transfers to the contractile material, we may speak of it as the receptive substance of the muscle. 

Langley s receptive substance paper described studies done at the neuromuscular junction. In earlier studies he had demonstrated that nicotine affected the ganglia of... 

Langley JN (1905) On the reaction of cells and of nerve-endings to certain poisons, chiefly as regards the reaction of striated muscle to nicotine and curari. J Physiol 33 374 13 Langley JN (1907) On the contraction of muscle, chiefly in relation to the presence of receptive substances. Part I, J Physiol 36 347-384... 

Following his extensive studies of nicotine, curare, and other chemicals acting on what is now known as the cholinergic nervous system, John Langley hypothesized that there must be receptive substances present in cells to explain the effects of nicotine alone and in combination with other chemicals. He wrote Since the accessory substance is the recipient of stimuli which it transfers to the contractile material, we may speak of it as the receptive substance (italics in original) of the muscle (Langley 1905). These conclusions followed from observations... 

The idea that drags act upon receptors began with Langley in 1878 [13], who introduced the term receptive substance [14]. However, the word receptor was introduced later, by Paul Ehrlich [15, 16]. During the first half of the 20th century, several observations highlighted the critical features associated with the... 

Which of the following individuals first referred to drugs acting on a receptive substance ... 

The ideas of Erhiich were continued by John Langley who proposed that animal cells had receptive substances on the surface, which became known as... 

Langley proposes that cells have receptive substances ... 

It is convenient to have a term for the specially excitable constituent and I have called it the receptive substance. It receives the stimulus [ recognition ] and by transmitting it [ transduction ] causes contraction [ response ]"... 

Langley, contemporaneously with the work of Ehrlich, used the term "receptive substance for these specific entities and speculated that specific receptors must exist for curare, atropine, pilocarpine and the other autonomic drugs with which his research had been principally concerned. Certainly, the specificity of such drug-receptor interactions had been anticipated by Emil Fischer who wrote ... 

In 1905, John Newport Langley (1852-1925) reported on his experiments, carried out at Cambridge University, with nicotine and curare on the skeletal muscles of frogs and chickens, where he formulated the concept of cellular receptive substances (we would say structures ), which mediate the activity of these agents. [123] This represents the actual foundation of a neuronal receptor theory (Fig. 8.32), and led Paul Ehrlich two years later to propose more generally the existence of chemoreceptors for drugs. 

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