 The process of protein denaturation (as distinguished from coagulation) had been discovered in 1910 by Harriette Chick and Charles Martin, but its nature was still mysterious.Tim Anson and Alfred Mirsky had shown that denaturation was a "reversible, two-state process" that results in many chemical groups becoming available for chemical reactions, including cleavage by enzymes.In 1929, Hsien Wu hypothesized correctly that denaturation corresponded to protein unfolding, a purely conformational change that resulted in the exposure of amino-acid side chains to the solvent.