Today, the concept of specific receptors for drugs and transmitters lies at the very heart of pharmacology. Less than one hundred years ago, this novel idea met with considerable resistance in the scientific community. To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of John Newport Langley, one of the founders of the receptor concept, we highlight his most important observations, and those of Paul Ehrlich and Alfred Joseph Clark, who similarly helped to establish the receptor theory of drug action.

One of the basic theories oftwentieth-century scientific medicine is the receptor concept. It deals with the question of how information can be submitted to the cell. Receptors can be described as "small, discrete area(s) on the cell membrane or within the cell with which molecules or molecular complexes (for example, hormones, drugs, and other chemical messengers) interact" .1 The receptor concept became increasingly important, especially for pharmacology, as it explained the binding of drugs to cells and drug-effects on specific tissues and organs. The origins of the receptor concept stem from the last third of the nineteenth century and are chiefly connected with two names: Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) and John Newport Langley (1852-1925). Remarkably, these two scientists approached the receptor idea on significantly different routes and from different backgrounds: John Newport Langley, professor ofphysiology in Cambridge, was predominantly concerned with the investigation of the functions of the autonomic nervous system, i.e. of those nerves which regulate, without our conscious influence, the vegetative functions of the body, such as blood-pressure and respiration. Paul Ehrlich, the Berlin bacteriologist and immunologist, was keen to examine the relations between bacterial toxins and antitoxins and to support contemporary efforts to combat infectious diseases. Both mentioned the idea first in 1878, and both returned to their former approaches only several years later-at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. According to our current knowledge about the history of the receptor concept, the two scientists developed their initial ideas on receptors independently.2

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This paper deals with an important development of scientific pharmacology, focusing on the reaction of the German pharmacologist Walther Straub to the receptor concept, which was a new approach to explain the binding of drugs to cells in the young discipline of pharmacology after 1900. The article analyzes how Straub as an important representative of his field between 1900 and 1944 was influenced by nineteenth-century thinking, and how he developed a rival physical theory to combat the receptor concept. Straub is seen as a man of transition, who on the one side tackled a core question of drug research with modern experimental methods, but on the other side was hardly able to accept new results in chemistry.