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Living History of Physiology
 Bodil
Schmidt-Nielsen
Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen brought to the presidency of APS traditions
different from those of her recent predecessors. Of the eleven presidents
beginning with Pappenheimer (1964-65), seven of them received a major part
of their education or training in laboratories at Harvard University.
Schmidt-Nielsen's background, by contrast, was in a relatively small but
unusually distinguished laboratory in Copenhagen founded by her parents,
August and Marie Krogh (11).
"I am the youngest of four children. My father and mother were both
physiologists, and we children were daily exposed to conversations dealing
with topics in physiology. Also, the many visitors and guests who came to
the house were mostly scientists. During the first five years of schooling I
was educated at home by a private teacher, together with my two-years older
sister. This gave us the opportunity to have lunch daily with our parents as
they came over to the house from the laboratory. . . . At the age of eleven
I entered the Rysensteen Gymnasium from which I graduated in 1937
specializing in mathematics and natural sciences. I must acknowledge the
superb teachers I had in the Danish gymnasium."
Although she had originally intended to study medicine, Schmidt-Nielsen
decided rather to enter the School of Dentistry, where she quickly
discovered that she was fascinated by the subject of physiology. She began
to tutor fellow students in the subject and began also a research project on
the exchange of calcium and phosphorus in human teeth (1). She was married
to Knut Schmidt-Nielsen in 1939. (This marriage ended in divorce in 1965; in
1968 she married Roger G. Chagnon.) The first of her three children was born
shortly after she received her D.D.S. degree in 1941. Her father then
advised her to give up plans for continuing studies in medicine in favor of
experimental work. She therefore continued research in the School of
Dentistry, audited lectures in physiology at the university, and briefly
practiced dentistry while she taught prosthetics and, later, dental surgery.
In 1946 she became the first person to qualify in Denmark for the newly
established degree doctor of odontology. She received the Dr. Phil. degree
in 1955.
"In 1946 Laurence Irving and Per F. Scholander invited my husband and me
to come to Swarthmore College as research associates. We sailed for the
United States on 5 November 1946, in a rickety Liberty ship with our two
children. We arrived in Swarthmore on 2 December. There I first worked with
gas analysis using Scholander's new micromethods. Then, in the spring of
1947 Irving suggested that we study water metabolism of kangaroo rats in
southern Arizona. We worked in the desert with kangaroo rats, pocket mice,
and the desert rat Neotoma during two summers (1947 and 1948). The
experiments were continued at Swarthmore, and later at Stanford University,
where I decided to learn about renal function. In my spare time I studied
Homer Smith's book on the kidney (Physiology of the Kidney, Oxford,
1937). The next important event in my education came when, on Smith's
invitation, I spent my first summer at Mount Desert Island Biological
Laboratory working with Roy Forster on urea secretion by frog tubules. My
background with my father's laboratory had already prepared me for becoming
a comparative physiologist, but I did not know how much the comparative
approach dominated my thinking until I started working in comparative renal
physiology at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory. Further, the many
discussions with other scientists there, including Homer Smith and E. K.
Marshall, immensely stimulated my interest."
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