The first experiments indicating that some plants do not use  carbon fixation but instead produce malate and aspartate in the first step of carbon fixation were done in the 1950s and early 1960s by Hugo Peter Kortschak and Yuri Karpilov. The  pathway was elucidated by Marshall Davidson Hatch and Charles Roger Slack, in Australia, in 1966. While Hatch and Slack originally referred to the pathway as the "C dicarboxylic acid pathway", it is sometimes called the Hatch–Slack pathway.