History of cell membrane

In the early stages of the twentieth century, little was known about cell membranes. Until the early 1950s, the biological cell membrane was rarely mentioned in scientific literature. It was recognised that something was probably there, but hardly anything about it was known. Considering the lack of technical equipment available a century ago, scientists such as Charles Overton and Edwin Gorter were not only exploring new territory in looking at the properties of cell membranes, …

…red blood cells they showed the first detailed analysis of structure based on a new model. They extracted the lipid from a red blood cell and spread it as a film on water. The area covered by the lipid turned out to be twice the surface area of the red blood cell. Gorter and Grendel thus concluded that in a cell membrane phospholipids must be arranged as a bilayer, i.e. two lipid molecules thick (4).