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47th APS President (1974-1975)
Arthur C. Guyton
(1919-2003)
"Sectionalization" has a long history in APS; it extends back at least to
the presidency of William F. Hamilton (1955-56). It was, and is, a sort of
catchword for attempts to unify the Society by providing publications and
membership sections desired by each of the subspecialties of the science.
Earlier presidents left office frustrated by their inability to move the
Society in this direction. Under the presidency of Guyton, however, both
forms of sectionalization were approved and formally announced to the
Society in the "Presidents report" (Physiologist 18: 79-82, 1975).
Guyton was born in Oxford, Mississippi, and received his early education
there. He was an honor graduate of the University of Mississippi (1939),
where he won prizes both for work in physics and in a short story contest.
For his medical education he went to Harvard (M.D., 1943) and then became a
surgical intern at Massachusetts General Hospital. By 1 January 1944, he was
in the U.S. Navy and was assigned first to the National Naval Medical Center
in Bethesda (4 months) and then to Camp Detrick in Maryland for research in
bacterial warfare (22 months). In 1946 he was able to return to
Massachusetts General Hospital to continue his surgical residency, but he
contracted poliomyelitis and was obliged to give up these plans. A year
later (1947) he joined the faculty of the School of Medicine at the
University of Mississippi. The following year, at the age of twenty-nine, he
was appointed professor and chairman of the Department of Physiology and
Biophysics. He has held these appointments for nearly forty years.
Guyton's loyalty to his home state and to its region extends well outside
the university. He is a member of the Southern Society for Clinical
Investigation, was president in 1956-57, and received the Founder's Award in
1979. As a member of the Mississippi Heart Association, he was president in
1955-56 and received its Silver Medallion Award for Research in 1961. He was
president of the Mississippi Academy of Science in 1967-68; from the academy
he received major awards in 1976 and 1980. He is a charter member (1975) of
the University of Mississippi Hall of Fame.
For AHA, Guyton served on its Policy Committee (1960-61), Board of
Directors (1961-67), and Publications Board (1971-77), as well as on the
Advisory Council for the Circulation Section and on the Council for High
Blood Pressure Research. He is a member of the International Society for
Hypertension. His lifelong interest in the circulation and major research
contributions have brought him awards and honors from a remarkable variety
of organizations: the Ida B. Gould Award of AAAS in 1959, the Wiggers Award
of the Circulation Group of APS in 1972, and the Annual Research Achievement
Award of AHA and the Dickinson Richards Award of the Pulmonary Council of
AHA in 1975. He has been an honorary fellow of the American College of
Cardiology from 1975. At the 400th Anniversary Symposium in honor of William
Harvey in London, England, in 1978, Guyton delivered the Harvey Lecture and,
in the following year, gave the First Annual Evan Jones Memorial Lecture at
St. Thomas' Hospital in London. These honors were followed by the George
Griffith Memorial Lectureship of the California Heart Association (1980),
the Ciba Award for Research in Hypertension (1980), and the Jenssen Annual
Lectureship of the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists (1982).
Early in his career, Guyton was selected by the U.S. Junior Chamber of
Commerce as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men of America for 1951. In
1956 he received the U.S. Presidential Citation for Development of Aids for
Handicapped Persons. Other honors include recognition by the American
Society of Anesthesiologists (1967), the Biomedical Engineering Society
(1972), and the University of Nebraska (1972). He was given the Leonard and
Lillian Ratner Award (1973) and awards by the American College of Chest
Physicians (1973), ACDP (1975), the American Surgical Society (1975), and
the Albany Medical College (1977). He was honored by the International
Anesthesia Research Society (1977) and by the Medical College of Wisconsin
(1977) where he gave the Walter E. MacPherson Lecture and received the D.Sc.
degree. In 1979 he delivered the Einthoven Lecture and received the medal
given biennially by the Einthoven Foundation of Leiden, Holland. The
University of Western Ontario invited him to give the James A. F. Stevenson
Memorial Lecture in 1980. A year later he received the Mellon Award of the
University of Pittsburgh, and in 1982 he received an honorary M.D. degree
from the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
Guyton has long been an active member of the Biophysical Society, as well
as of the Biomedical Engineering Society. For four years (1957-61; chairman,
1959-61) he was a member of the Physiology Test Committee of the National
Board of Medical Examiners. He is a fellow of AAAS and served on the Council
of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine for six years
(1965-71). For the NIH he served on the Cardiovascular Study Section
(1954-58), the Physiology Training Grant Committee (1958-64; chairman,
1961-64), and the National Heart and Lung Council (1971-75).
Elected to membership in APS in 1949, like many other former presidents,
Guyton began his official service for the Society on its editorial boards
(1958-63) and as chairman of the Education Committee (1967-70). He was
elected councillor in 1972 and president elect the following year. (Because
he was appointed chairman of the Finance Committee in 1977, he continued as
an ex officio member of Council for another five years, 1977-82.) He is a
member of three sections of APS: Neurophysiology, Circulation, and
Respiration. In 1981 he received the Ray G. Daggs Award of the Society. As
president of FASEB (1975-76), he steered the Federation Board and the member
societies through a reorganization that resulted in a more flexible
financial relationship.
Although his formal association with physiology came only after Guyton
had all but completed his training as a surgeon, he had been carrying out
experiments of one sort or another from the time he was a small boy. He
described his research "training" as follows:
"Perhaps the most important aspect of my research training was the lack of
any specific formal episode, but instead a continuing self-interest in
research beginning rather early in life. Like many other young boys, I had
my own shop, which later became more a laboratory especially in the field of
electronics. I built devices such as an oscilloscope, code recorder,
multiple amateur radio transmitters, multiple radio amateur receivers, an
operational amplifier for multiplication in the days before analog computers
began to be used, and so forth. This continued through college years. Then
during medical school I had also a research fellowship working primarily on
physical chemistry projects under Dr. A. Baird Hastings. However, Dr.
Hastings was caught up in the war effort, so that most of my work there was
likewise without direct supervision. My association with Hastings and with
others in the department such as Oliver Lowry and Jack Buchanan provided a
high degree of stimulus to continue research. Fortunately, during World War
II, I was assigned to bacterial warfare research and immediately entered
into a number of different research projects, which led to the first series
of electronic and physiological research papers I published."
"During my stint as a surgical intern prior to World War II and as a
surgical resident afterwards at the Massachusetts General Hospital, I worked
on several projects of a surgical nature, especially projects related to
intubation of patients, intermittent suction devices, and so forth. I was
allowed to set up a laboratory and was about to get a number of projects
underway related to shock and other studies at the time I developed polio in
1946. Thus this was my background for research when I decided to go into
academic and research life on a permanent basis beginning in 1947. However,
aside from the above experience, probably the one single factor in my
training that has been most important through the years was the several
summers during my college days when I studied mathematical analysis of
electronic circuits. This provided the basis for our subsequent analysis of
circulatory, respiratory, renal and body fluid mechanisms, all of which
require the same type of mathematical analysis. . . . My principal interest
over the years of research has been to provide a working analysis of total
circulatory function, with special emphasis on all the important regulatory
mechanisms."
In his first paper, published in 1946, Guyton described a method for
measuring the size of particles in aerosols (1). By 1948, however, his
bibliography begins the long and distinguished series of publications on the
circulatory system. A typical paper is the one in 1951 by Guyton and J. W.
Harris (2) on what had been regarded as "spontaneous" cycles of oscillation
in arterial pressure. They attributed these waves to variations in
vasomotion as a result of oscillation in the baroreceptor control system. In
the next paper listed here (3), the control of cardiac output was approached
via studies on venous return, and the factors that determine both venous
return and cardiac output were analyzed here an eventually more fully in a
monograph (6). Guyton's research on pulmonary capillary function is typified
by the 1959 paper with A. W. Lindsey on pulmonary edema (4). They found that
when left atrial pressure is raised, or when plasma protein concentration is
lowered, pulmonary edema does not necessarily occur at once, because the
system includes "safety factors" that defend the alveoli against fluid
accumulation. One of Guyton's best-known discoveries, although he calls it
"controversial," is the negative pressure in interstitial fluid surrounding
capillaries and lymphatics (5).
Autoregulation of local blood flow is another major theme of Guyton's
work. In 1964, with other authors (7), he described the linkage of decreases
in oxygen supply with increases in local blood flow that has become a part
of every textbook account. Autoregulation of renal glomerular blood flow by
feedback control at the juxtaglomerular apparatus was proposed as a result
of a theoretical computer analysis in 1964 (8). This has led to intensive
investigation of the phenomenon and of the function of the juxtaglomerular
apparatus in a number of different laboratories. More extensive but related
analyses using computers were published in review articles (9-11) and in a
monograph (13) describing regulation of the circulation as it involves body
fluid volumes, cardiac output, local blood flow, arterial pressure, and
other significant variables. Both the normal circulation and hypertension
are included.
Of all the former presidents who have authored or edited textbooks of
physiology, Guyton probably has had the broadest influence on students in
medical school and college courses. Currently in print are three different
textbooks of physiology, one of neurophysiology, and additional volumes he
has written or edited. Especially in considering difficult topics, Guyton's
style of writing can be paraphrased thus: "We do not know fully how this
system operates. But one way it might function is as follows: . . ."
Guyton's explanations, although hypothetical, are always reasonable and
therefore easy for students to understand and remember. Their teachers
appreciate the engaging honesty of his expositions.
Selected Publications
1. Guyton, A. C. Electronic counting and size determination of particles
in aerosols. J. Ind. Hyg. 28: 133, 1946.
2. Guyton, A. C., and J. W. Harris. Pressoreceptor-autonomic oscillation:
a probable cause of vasomotor waves. Am. J. Physiol. 165: 158, 1951.
3. Guyton, A. C. Determination of cardiac output by equating venous
return curves with cardiac response curves. Physiol. Rev. 35: 123,
1955.
4. Guyton, A. C., and A. W. Lindsey. Effect of elevated left atrial
pressure and decreased plasma protein concentration on the development of
pulmonary edema. Circ. Res. 7: 649, 1959.
5. Guyton, A. C. A concept of negative interstitial pressure based on
pressures in implanted perforated capsules. Circ. Res. 12: 399-414,
1963.
6. Guyton, A. C. Circulatory Physiology: Cardiac Output and Its
Regulation Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 1963.
7. Guyton, A. C., J. M. Ross, O. Carrier, Jr., and J. R. Walker. Evidence
for tissue oxygen demand as the major factor causing autoregulation.
Circ. Res. 14: 60-69, 1964.
8. Guyton, A. C., J. B. Langston, and G. Navar. Theory for renal
autoregulation by feedback at the juxtaglomerular apparatus. Circ. Res.
14: 187-197, 1964.
9. Guyton, A. C., and T. G. Coleman. Long-term regulation of the
circulation: interrelationships with body fluid volumes. In: Physical
Bases of Circulatory Transport Regulation and Exchange. Philadelphia,
PA: Saunders, 1967.
10. Guyton, A. C., T. G. Coleman, and H. J. Granger. Circulation: overall
regulation. Annu. Rev. Physiol. 34: 13-46, 1972.
11. Guyton, A. C., T. G. Coleman, A. W. Cowley, Jr., R. D. Manning, Jr.,
R. A. Norman, Jr., and J. D. Ferguson. A systems analysis approach to
understanding long-range arterial blood pressure control and hypertension.
Circ. Res. 35: 159-176, 1974.
12. Guyton, A. C. Past-president's address. Physiology, a beauty and a
philosophy. Physiologist 18: 495-501, 1975.
13. Guyton, A. C. Circulatory Physiology III: Arterial Pressure and
Hypertension. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 1980.
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