He shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his elucidation of the production of heat and mechanical work in muscles.

[3][4] Born in Bristol, he was educated at Blundell's School and graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge as third wrangler in the mathematics tripos before turning to physiology.

The paper, written under the supervision of John Newport Langley, is a landmark in the history of receptor theory, because the context for the derivation was the binding of nicotine and curare to the "receptive substance" at the neuromuscular junction.

At the end of 1915, while home on leave he was asked by Horace Darwin from the Ministry of Munitions to come for a day to advise them on how to train anti-aircraft gunners.

On site, Hill immediately proposed a simple two mirror method to determine airplanes' heights.

[7][8] To measure and compute he assembled the Anti-Aircraft Experimental Section, a team of men too old for conscription, Ralph H. Fowler (a wounded officer), and lads too young for service including Douglas Hartree, Arthur Milne and James Crowther.

In 1933, he became with William Beveridge and Lord Rutherford a founder member and vice-president of the Academic Assistance Council (which in 1936 became the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning).

By the start of the Second World War, the organisation had saved 900 academics (18 of whom went on to win Nobel Prizes) from Nazi persecution.

He prominently displayed in his laboratory a toy figure of Adolf Hitler with saluting arm upraised, which he explained was in gratitude for all the scientists Germany had expelled, some of whom were now working with him.

[10] In 1935, he served with Patrick Blackett and Sir Henry Tizard on the committee that gave birth to radar.

In 1940, he was posted to the British Embassy in Washington to promote war research in the still neutral United States.

Hill saw the answer and persuaded the British to show the Americans everything they were working on (except for the atomic bomb).

In 1952, he became head of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and Secretary General of the International Council of Scientific Unions.

[14] Hill made many exacting measurements of the heat released when skeletal muscles contract and relax.

A key finding was that heat is produced during contraction, which requires investment of chemical energy, but not during relaxation, which is passive.

He continually improved his apparatus to make it more sensitive and to reduce the time lag between the heat released by the preparation and its recording by his thermocouple.

Hill returned briefly to Cambridge in 1919 before taking the chair in physiology at the Victoria University of Manchester in 1920 in succession to William Stirling.

Using himself as the subject — he ran every morning from 7:15 to 10:30 — he showed that running a dash relies on energy stores which afterwards are replenished by increased oxygen consumption.

They had two sons and two daughters: On 9 September 2015, an English Heritage Blue plaque was erected at Hill's former home, 16 Bishopswood Road, Highgate, where he had lived from 1923 to 1967.

In Hill's time, according to his grandson Nicholas Humphrey, regular guests at the house included 18 exiled Nobel laureates, his brother-in-law, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and also friends as diverse and unexpected as Sigmund Freud[25] and Stephen Hawking, he met during the course of his long and extraordinary life.

[26][27][28] After-dinner conversations in the drawing room would inevitably involve passionate debates about science or politics.

"Every Sunday we would have to attend a tea party at grandpa’s house and apart from entertaining some extraordinary guests, he would devise some great games for us, such as frog racing in the garden or looking through the lens of a (dissected) sheep’s eye".

Sir Ralph Kohn FRS who proposed the Blue plaque, said: "The Nobel Prize winner A. V. Hill contributed vastly to our understanding of muscle physiology.

[29] A. V. Hill played a crucial role in assisting and rescuing many refugees to continue their work in this country".