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This paper deals with an important development of scientific pharmacology, focusing on the reaction of the German pharmacologist Walther Straub to the receptor concept, which was a new approach to explain the binding of drugs to cells in the young discipline of pharmacology after 1900. The article analyzes how Straub as an important representative of his field between 1900 and 1944 was influenced by nineteenth-century thinking, and how he developed a rival physical theory to combat the receptor concept. Straub is seen as a man of transition, who on the one side tackled a core question of drug research with modern experimental methods, but on the other side was hardly able to accept new results in chemistry.