Philip Ball peers into the quantum past, and uncovers a little-known paper published by Niels Bohr, Hendrik Kramers and John Slater in 1924, that proposed that the first law of thermodynamics may no ...

The imidazole groups of the C-terminal histidines of the β-chains, together with the α-amino groups of the α-chains, are responsible for most of the Bohr effect. In oxyhaemoglobin these groups are ...