Manuel Morales


Manuel Francisco Morales was a Honduran-born American biophysicist who did pivotal research on the molecular basis of muscle contraction.

Scientific career

In the 1950s at the Naval Medical Research Institute, Morales and Terrell Hill showed that the high energy of the terminal phosphate bond in ATP was due to electrostatic repulsion between the three phosphate groups, and he and Richard Podolsky measured the heat of hydrolysis for ATP cleavage, the fundamental energy currency of biological metabolism.

Awards and service

Morales was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and awarded the Order of the Rising Sun. He served as President of the Biophysical Society for 1968–69, and was the founding editor of the Annual Review of Biophysics.

Key publications