Mitchell and Proticity

Mitchell and Proticity

Regarding your recent story,¹ most of the work of Peter Mitchell did not come from "Mitchell's imagination." Mitchell's hypothesis was in the literature and letters to him before he published any discussion of proticity. I wrote the history of the ideas in bio-energetics in a 1993 paper.² Another major contributor was R.E. Davies in 1952. The work of both of us was never acknowledged by Mitchell despite the fact that he knew both of us well and had asked for help from at least one of us in understanding the ideas of proticity. In response to this request Williams described the possibilities that protons acted across and in membranes, locally or delocalized. However, even this lack of acknowledgement of early work in 1961 is not the only fault with the work of Mitchell. In 1961 and subsequently, he fought against the idea that...