As a boy, David often acted as an assistant in his father's experiments. Like his father, he was an undergraduate at Trinity, Cambridge, which he entered in 1934 with a major scholarship. In his first two years, he studied physics and chemistry as well as physiology. He then registered as a medical student because in those days a medical qualification was a prerequisite for an academic career in physiology. After doing the necessary anatomy and the final-year physiology course, he had one year of research before the outbreak of the Second World War.
In that year he continued his father's work on isolated muscles from frogs, using for his heat measurements the equipment that A.V. had developed at University College London. He re-examined the absorption of heat that occurs during the first minute after a contraction, and showed that it is caused by the resynthesis of adenosine triphosphate (the immediate source of the energy dissipated during contraction) by transphosphorylation from phosphoryl creatine, and not by a stage in the formation of lactic acid from carbohydrates as had previously been supposed. He also measured the time courses of three other processes during recovery after a contraction that had not been previously measured because of their small size and slow time course: oxygen consumption, production of heat and changes in pH. This was a remarkable achievement for a young scientist in so short a time and on the strength of it David was elected to a research fellowship at Trinity College.
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