Bulletin

Issue: April 2006

Research in Action

New concepts for logic in the modern age

It’s not often that researchers re-write the textbook, but La Trobe University Muscle Research Laboratory scientists have done just that.

The latest edition of the Biology 1 text book for VCE students published by Heinemann carries a full page story about research led by Professors George Stephenson and Graham Lamb. The research overturned a widely-held but incorrect theory that acidity, through a build up of lactic acid, was a major cause of muscle fatigue.

Professors Stephenson and Lamb discovered that the opposite is true – that acidity helps prevent muscle fatigue – and they discovered and explained the complex mechanism involving the role of chloride, by which this happens.

Because many biology books had over the years espoused the incorrect facts, Professor Lamb requested textbook publishers to correct the error. Heinemann’s Biology 1 is the first to do so.