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Clark, your original
first name was Klaus-Hans. This is very German; can you describe your
german heritage and how did you happen to become �Clark�?
My
given names were actually Klaus Martin. Klaus is indeed a common German
first name; it was my parents� choice. Martin was my maternal
grandfather�s first name; he died in late 1917 while in the German Army.
Clark, my legal first name now, was given to me by American soldiers in
1942; we were war refugees then, living in Casablanca, Morocco. They had
liberated us a few days earlier, and a company of soldiers had
established a campsite in a field just across the street from the
apartment building in which we lived. One of them thought that Clark was
the translation for Klaus (actually, it should have been Claude). I
liked it and adopted it as my own when we finally came to the US in 1948
(although I didn�t know about Clark �Superman� Kent and Clark Gable in
those days!).
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Indeed, being a
Jewish citizen in Berlin during the Third Reich era must have been a
dramatic family experience. How long did you stay in Germany, and how
did you manage to escape the Nazi regime?
The only relatively clear memory of events that I personally have of my
first 6 years of life in Berlin are the 1936 Olympics and Mussolini�s first
visit to the city that year. I remember the many huge flags that decorated
the city everywhere and the crowd and military parade on the broad avenue
between the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column. But I was not affected
in any personal way that I can still remember by the anti-Semitic acts that
were then increasingly occurring in Germany until I enrolled for the very
first time in school, in the Fall of 1938. Jewish children were then no
longer allowed to attend public schools; they could only attend �shuls�, the
religious schools affiliated with synagogues. My parents registered me in
the one in our neighborhood, and I attended it from the beginning of that
academic year until November 9, 1938. That was the date of the infamous
�Kristallnacht� or �Night of Broken Glass�, when most of the synagogues and
Jewish businesses in Germany were sacked and torched by the Nazis. This
event marked the beginning of my awareness of serious perturbations to the
life of our family and, naturally, it brought my schooling in Germany to an
abrupt end before I had even learnt to read and write.
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Please describe how your father was incarcerated by the
regime, and your mother took you to the Gestapo headquarters and actually
managed to free him.
Many Jewish men were arrested during the days immediately following Kristalnacht and interned in concentration camps (�konzentrationlager�, KZ
for short); but, for unknown reasons, my father was not arrested then, but
later, in early December, while on a trip to Cotbus, in East Germany, a
regular business stop of his. He had a �stammhotel� there, i.e., a preferred
hotel where he always stayed and was well known. We learnt the circumstances
of his arrest later. He was told by the regular desk clerk that the hotel
was full (it wasn�t, of course), forcing him to seek lodgings elsewhere in
town. After several other rejections, he eventually found a place, had
dinner there, and went up to his room. The next morning, while at breakfast,
he was approached by two local police officers who accused him of having
written into the margins of the preceding day�s local paper some derogatory
comments about a speech that Hitler had delivered the previous day (he
hadn�t, of course), and arrested him. I remember distinctly two uniformed
Berlin policemen (�Schupos�) coming to our apartment on Eisennacher Strasse
in Schoenenberg that evening (we had been evicted 2 years earlier from our
original, then brand new apartment in Dahlem, to make way for Nazi
functionaries) to inform my mother of his arrest. A week or so after his
arrest in Cotbus, my father was transferred to the KZ in Buchenwald and,
some months later, to that in Dachau. A few days after his arrest, my mother
moved me to my maternal grand mother�s, where I remained for several weeks
while she appealed to every conceivable office, seeking ways to having my
father freed. She was a very pretty, blond, green-eyed, Aryan-looking young
woman - and unafraid. I was a blond, prototypic German boy then. She
therefore often took me along with her to Gestapo headquarters because our
looks facilitated entry into the building and access to officials, and, she
hoped, that together we would garner more sympathy. The only solution to
obtaining my Dad�s freedom, she was eventually informed, was for us all to
emigrate.
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The ship that took
you from Germany was the �St. Louis�. The last journey of the �St.
Louis�, on which you were a passenger, has received considerable
attention from historians. Can you explain its significance?
Around that time, word got around among the Jewish population in Berlin
that Cuba was allowing Jews to immigrate and that �landing permits� could be
obtained for a certain sum. My mother managed to procure three such permits
and, consequently also, the necessary exit visas from Germany and the
passages on the MV �St. Louis�; this ship, a luxurious mainliner of the Hapag-Amerika Line that normally sailed regularly between Hamburg and New
York, had been chartered by the Nazi authorities specifically for the
one-time transport of forcibly expelled German and Austrian Jews like us to
Cuba. All of us, by the way, were then also obliged to give up our German or
Austrian nationalities, consequently becoming �stateless� persons.
In preparation for the trip, my mother sold or gave away whatever she
thought we would not be able to take and packed whatever we could take. My
father was released from Dachau on May 10, 1939 and quickly joined us in
Hamburg to where my mother and I had traveled a few days earlier, staying
with her first cousins (who eventually made their escape to Shanghai, China,
where they lived during the Japanese occupation). On May 13, we embarked on
the �St. Louis� and sailed to Havana. We were 3 among 937 other German and
Austrian Jews of all ages, from babes-in-arms to elderly grandparents. Many
of the men had, like my father, just been released from KZs and all were
happy to escape with their lives, but also extremely distressed at being
forced to abandon their homes, families, personal possessions and,
especially, their homeland. However, since we were on our way, we thought,
to a free and normal life, the mood on board gradually lightened. Indeed,
the cruise was for most a welcome relief from the previous, terrible
worries. The crew and, especially, the Captain, Captain Gustav Schroeder,
were genuinely sympathetic to our plight and sensitive to our needs. We, the
children, had a particularly enjoyable time on board, playing, making new
friends, and carrying on as children do.
Unfortunately, this happy voyage changed into most unhappy when we
arrived in Havana. It turned out then that the �landing permits� that
virtually all the passengers had bought in Germany were a horrible scam
perpetrated by a greedy Cuban official, the then Director of Immigration.
The permits could have gotten us through had this official included the then
President of Cuba, Federico Laredo Bru, in his scheme; but he hadn�t. As a
result, the permits were annulled and we were not allowed to disembark;
indeed, the ship was not even allowed to dock, only to anchor in the bay. It
was learnt later that the annulment of the permits had been decreed even
before the �St. Louis� had left Hamburg and that the Nazis knew it. In
retrospect, that is probably why they reserved the ship and allowed us to
leave in the first place: anticipating that we would not be allowed to land,
they intended to capitalize on our rejection for propaganda purposes, as
indeed they did. The ship remained in Havana bay for about a week when it
was ordered to leave Cuban waters altogether. We then cruised back and forth
off Miami for another week while urgent negotiations were held between the
Cuban government and representatives of the JOINT Distribution Committee, a
US-based international Jewish organization. These negotiations began
virtually as soon as our plight became public. The JOINT tried very hard to
convince the Cubans to allow us to land, including the offering of very
substantial financial guarantees to insure that we would not become wards of
the state; for it was clear what would happen to us all if we had to return
to Germany. But the Cubans would not yield. The JOINT then appealed to other
nations in this hemisphere to admit us, including the US and Canada, but
also in vain. The rejection by the US was particularly shocking to many of
us because the US was the ultimate destination for most of the passengers,
including ourselves. My parents had, in fact, applied to immigrate to the US
beginning in 1938, after it became increasingly evident that the Nazi
persecutions of the Jews were meant in earnest. Indeed, virtually all the
passengers were on a numbered waiting list, a �quota�, awaiting US entry
visas; Cuba was to be, therefore, only a way station en route to the US.
Ultimately, during the night of June 7, 1939 the parent company of the
�St. Louis� ordered the ship to return to Germany, to the enormous
consternation and very grave concern, even panic, of the adult passengers.
As mentioned earlier, the Nazi propaganda machine was then quick to
capitalize on our rejection by all the countries, arguing that Jews were not
welcome anywhere in the world. As one can imagine, our ordeal had meanwhile
become a �cause celebre�, reported in newspapers, magazines, radios, and
newsreels around the globe. It is now considered to be a part of the
beginning of the Holocaust, remembered in books and films (e.g., �The Voyage
of the Damned�, 1976). Captain Schroeder, who worked valiantly to try and
save us, was honored by Israel in 1993 as a �Righteous Among the Nations�. A
permanent exhibit commemorating our odyssey is at the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, another at the Museum
of Jewish Heritage in New York City, and one also at Yad Vashem in
Jerusalem. There are also many pages about the saga of the �St. Louis� on
the Internet, and several new books, three by German authors (the latest by
Georg Reinfelder, �MS "St. Louis". Die Irrfahrt
nach Kuba Fr�hjahr 1939�, Hentrich & Hentrich Teetz, 2002; available from
Abebooks.com) and the most recent by two members of the USHMM (Sarah
A. Ogilvie and Scott Miller, �Refuge Denied�, University of Wisconsin Press,
2006), have been published since 2001.
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Returning to Europe
after being denied refuge in Cuba and the United States, most of the
passengers were recaptured by the German troops and sent off to
concentration camps. How did you escape and where did you go?
We, the younger children on board the �St. Louis�, were generally
unaware of our plight and continued to enjoy the ship. Fortunately for all
our sakes, very near the end of our return journey to Germany, Belgium,
England, France and Holland finally responded to the appeals of the JOINT
and each granted temporary asylum to approximately one quarter of the
passengers, respectively. The ship docked in Antwerp on June 17, 1939, 34
days after it had left Hamburg, and the passengers were divided among these
four countries; we were assigned to Belgium. My parents rented a small
apartment in Brussels, and we settled down to await the calling of our quota
number to the US. But three months later, in September 1939, the Germans
invaded Poland and WWII officially began. Since there was nowhere else for
us to go right then, we stayed in Brussels and continued to wait for our
visa to the US. In October, my parents enrolled me in the public elementary
school in our neighborhood. I quickly learned to speak French and soon also
to read and write. This enabled me to serve as my parents� translator, as
they were slower to learn the new language than I. For me personally, life
continued to be fun; my parents shielded me completely from their
preoccupations so that I was blissfully unaware of their concerns even if I
was somewhat aware of the strange conditions of our lives.
But all that changed rather abruptly when the Germans attacked
Belgium, France and Holland; Brussels was bombed very early in the morning
of May 8. I remember that I was terribly scared by the noise of the diving Stukas, the falling bombs and the ensuing explosions. We hid in our
building�s cellar for about 24 hours while the bombardments seemed to me to
be continuing uninterruptedly. My memories from then on are very vivid. We
urgently had to flee before the Germans arrived! That we had been assigned
to Belgium rather than France or Holland actually worked to our advantage at
this point: the Belgians had allowed us our complete freedom whereas the
French and the Dutch interned their �St. Louis� guests in camps where they
still were when the Nazis invaded. The Belgian police arrested us right
after the first bombardment because we were Germans, i.e., enemy nationals
(actually wrong because, as already mentioned, the Nazis had withdrawn our
citizenship when we left � we were �stateless�, in fact � but that did not
matter to the Belgians at that point). But we were released in about 24
hours, when our status was clarified. We did not leave immediately then
because nobody expected the Germans to advance as rapidly as they did. But
when it became obvious that Brussels would fall, my parents gathered
whatever they absolutely needed from the leftovers from Germany into a
couple of suitcases, and we left. We went directly to the main train
station. It was mobbed with people shoving and pushing, trying to get
onboard the single, already full train then in the station; everyone said it
was the last train out of town. But try as we did, we were unable to fight
our way onboard. So, after the train left, we went back to the square in
front of the station, looking for other avenues of escape. Trucks were
passing by, loaded with fleeing refugees. One stopped and urged us to climb
aboard, but there was barely room for one more person, let alone three. My
father wanted my mother and me to get on, telling us he would catch up with
us later, but my mother insisted that she did not want us to separate. Soon
thereafter, we heard that another train was being assembled in the yards. We
returned to the station and, indeed, an empty train rolled in after a while.
We were able to board it easily and even found seats; it was then one, two
days at most, before the Germans entered Brussels. The train took us to the
French border. On the way, we caught up at a small, rural station with the
train we had missed earlier. It had been strafed by the Luftwaffe, and there
were dead and wounded onboard! How fortunate we were not to have been able
to get onboard that one! At the border, the French police took us off our
train for the same reason the Belgians had arrested us earlier. Fortunately,
our papers were all in order so that we were allowed to re-board the same
train, which was still in the station. It then continued to Paris, where
most of the passengers disembarked, no one then expecting the Germans to
occupy Paris! But when my parents learnt that our train was going to
continue to Toulouse and since they knew no one in Paris, they decided that
we would remain on board and continue south, as far away from the advancing
Germans as possible. That turned out to be a very wise decision indeed since
the Nazis soon thereafter arrived in Paris and continued southward. But
fortunately for us, the French surrendered, an armistice was declared, and
the demarcation line separating occupied from unoccupied France was drawn
north of Toulouse. We had escaped! Toulouse meanwhile was overfilling with
new refugees from the North and, to accommodate them, the local authorities
redistributed us and others to the surrounding villages; we were assigned to
Roques-sur-Garonne.
I do not remember exactly how long we stayed there � maybe a month or
two. I know that my parents were watching the advance of the Germans and
breathed a great sigh of relief when the armistice was declared and the
advance stopped. I also know that they discussed with other refugees there
what to do and where to go next � obviously Roques-sur-Garonne was not a
long-term solution. Lisbon, Portugal was a possibility because it was the
port from which boats to America sailed more or less regularly. But we did
not yet have our US immigration visas and Portugal did not allow refugees in
unless they were in transit. I do not know how my parents finally arrived at
their decision, but presumably it materialized during their discussions with
others that French Morocco could be a safe destination while awaiting our
visas. They told me years later that Morocco seemed to them then an
absolutely wild idea, but that they embraced it nevertheless because Morocco
was far away and it was not occupied by the Germans. The only possible way
to get there was by train through Spain, then across the Straight of
Gibraltar. But visas were needed to enter Spain as well as Morocco. We and
another family hired a driver and his car to take us to Perpignan, where the
nearest Spanish consulate and the dependency of the French Gendarmerie that
would issue the necessary exit visas from France and transit visas through
Spain were located. My mother, with me as her translator (since I was the
only one sufficiently fluent in French then) appealed to the various
functionaries involved and, after several visits, obtained all the required
documents. We then went on, again by car, to cross the border at La
Tour-de-Carol, in the Pyrenees (I did not know why then, but I gathered
subsequently that, visa or no visa, the guards on both sides of the frontier
were known to be more cooperative there than elsewhere). From La Tour, we
traveled by train for a couple of days, without ever getting off, south to
Algeciras, on the Mediterranean, and then crossed the Straight of Gibraltar
by ferry to Tetuan, Spanish Morocco (Gibraltar, though right there, was not
accessible since England and Germany were at war, and France [Vichy France]
and Spain were by then in the German camp). In Tetuan, with the help of
local Jews, we obtained the entry visas into French Morocco and, a few days
later, continued by train to Casablanca. It was now August 1940. I had just
turned 8 years old.
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What was life in
Morocco in those days?
We had to do several things right away: register with the police (a
requirement imposed on all the refugees by the Vichy government), register
with the local representative of the JOINT (our personal financial resources
were just about exhausted by then), and register with the American consulate
(to insure that we could be found quickly if and when our quota numbers
would finally be reached). We rented a small studio apartment (a
�garconniaire�, all that we could afford) and settled in. After some weeks,
with the help of new friends, my father found a(n illegal) job in a small
shoe factory, cutting leather for soles, something he had never done before
but had to learn in order to supplement the meager assistance we received
from the JOINT. In October, I entered the local elementary school, le �Petit
Lycee Lyautey�, but, again, the anti-Semitic rules of the Nazis, now adopted
by the Vichy French, caught up with me, and in December I was expelled and
had to transfer to what was called �une ecole Israelite�, a school for
Moroccan Jews. It was a bit far from where we lived, but, fortunately, the
instruction level there was not as bad as we feared; the differences were
mainly cultural, Moroccan Jews being Sephardic as contrasted to the
Ashkenazi German Jews. In 1942, rumors began to spread among the refugees
that we would all soon be arrested, interned in a camp, and deported to a KZ
in Germany. That was supposed to happen in November of 1942. Other bad news:
after the US had been attacked at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the
American consul had departed and, with him, our hope for an early passage to
the US. But life had to continue. There was rationing, shortages of many
things, long lines for everything, a good bit of stress and, occasionally,
some serious anxiety; but for the most part no immediate, real danger. The
Gestapo was not there, and Casablanca was never physically occupied by
German troops. There was a small military detachment in Fedala (now
Koutoubia), near Casablanca, but the soldiers were not visible and did not
intervene in our daily lives. Casablanca was a rest stop for German U-boats,
but only the commissioned and non-commissioned officers were allowed shore
leave and came into town in civilian clothes; they were recognizable to us
since they spoke and looked German, and they recognized us too, but never
said anything. The French had a big cruiser based in the harbor, the �Jean
Bart�, with its escort vessels, so that there were many sailors around. We
could see the harbor from our balcony, but not the �Jean Bart�. So life went
on, not perfect but passably good, notwithstanding the occasional frights
and the privations. My parents continued to shield me very effectively from
their own worries so that, as for me, I had no major concerns, generally
enjoyed myself, and grew up quite naturally. But I did hide my German-Jewish
origin from all my friends, for obvious reasons. When asked, I answered that
we were refugees from Alsace-Loraine, the French province that was German
until World War I.
The Americans landed in Fedala on November 4, 1942. They were under the
overall command of General Mark Clark and the local command of General
George Patton. They preceded their landing with an aerial and offshore ship
bombardment targeted mainly at the harbor and the airport, not the city
proper; it lasted only 2 or 3 days and was sporadic rather than continuous,
as far as I can remember. Although this was quite in contrast to the German
bombardment of Brussels, we nevertheless were all again rather frightened
until we understood that the city proper was not being targeted. We then
relaxed and even watched the bombardment from our balcony! The French were
under the command of General Giraud, who had distinguished himself in WWI
but was now the Vichy-France puppet governor of Morocco. He ordered
resistance to the allied attack, so that the French initially returned fire;
but their resistance collapsed when the �Jean Bart� was hit and disabled and
American soldiers began arriving from Fedala. They appeared in Casablanca
first in single files, in full battle gear, and took charge of various
strategic points in the city. After a few days, when recreational leave was
beginning to be granted to them, they appeared in pairs, still helmeted and
with side-arms, sight-seeing around town. Still later, when everyone was
even more relaxed, they came in droves and behaved like soldiers everywhere
on leave. As I mentioned earlier, one contingent established a camp in an
empty field directly across the street from our apartment house. The
soldiers were young, very friendly and kind, and we � the children
especially - soon began to talk with them, although we did not speak English
and they French. But somehow, we were able to communicate � they gave us
chocolate, coca-cola and chewing gum, novelties for us. Little by little, I
learned a few words of English. It was then that one of the soldiers asked
me my name and translated it into �Clark�. I was eventually allowed into the
camp and taken to the mess hall where I ate like I had not for a long time.
I then became a frequent visitor and befriended the cooks who gave me bread,
flour, rice, powdered eggs, sugar, powdered milk, that sort of thing, to
take home so that my parents too could share in this bounty. Unfortunately,
the camp closed after a few months when the troops were reassigned to
Tunisia, where the fighting was continuing.
Thanks to our liberation, I was able to re-enter the Petit Lycee
Lyautey and my father to obtain legal work. He was first hired by the
Americans to oversee indigenous laborers restoring the airport and building
a large military airbase there, then performed various contract jobs for the
Americans, and eventually opened a small business of his own. We were now
safe and gradually recovering financially, but still unable to move from our
tiny apartment and, although the American consulate reopened, still waiting
for our visa. In June 1943, I graduated from elementary school and proceeded
to high school, the �Grand Lycee Lyautey�. There was a US Army Military
Police camp across the street from the school; it was also an internment
camp for Italian prisoners of war. Thanks to my developing English, I
befriended a soldier who invited me in and, later, the Italians who were
staffing the mess hall, so that I was able to continue to bring some extra
food home since the rationing and the shortages were still in effect
(although there was plenty of black-marketing, but it was expensive).
Eventually, the military police force stationed across the street from the
Lycee was sent to Sicily, where the fighting had meanwhile moved. They were
replaced by a detachment of corpsmen attached to the 6th US Army
General Hospital, a major military hospital established in what had formerly
been the girls� high school (boys and girls did not attend the same school
then) that treated all the severely wounded from the North African and
Italian campaigns. The Italian POWs remained, however, and my pass continued
valid. All this allowed me to practice my English almost every day and even
to learn some Italian.
Another thing of note happened in 1943: the Casablanca Conference,
attended by Roosevelt, Churchill and de Gaulle during which they decided
that nothing short of the absolute, unconditional surrender of Germany would
be acceptable. We, of course, knew absolutely nothing about the meeting
until it was over, so that I have nothing personal to relate about it. Thus,
while things continued to settle down, our family�s situation was still in
an indeterminate state with respect to our future. My parents, however,
continued to protect me from their concerns so that my own daily life, from
1943 to 1948, was filled with the ordinary, carefree and fun activities of a
typical, growing 11 to 16 year-old schoolboy and his friends. Casablanca was
a great city in which to live then, fine weather all year-round, excellent
beaches, parks, cinemas, cafes, etc., and the resorts of the Atlas Mountains
for summer vacations. However, I continued to hide my German-Jewish
background.
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How did you move from Morocco to the United States?
When the war ended in 1945, my father�s business was beginning to do
pretty well and, except for the fact that we still could not find a decent
and affordable apartment, we were generally OK. But, we were still
�stateless�. Some time after the war, the Germans invited us to return to
Germany and to restore our citizenship. My parents decided they did not want
to. They were too resentful of what the Nazis had done to us and to our
family: they had taken virtually everything away from us and later murdered
several family members in concentration camps, including my paternal uncles
in Auschwitz; the remaining survivors were dispersed all over the world -
South Africa, China, Chile. My parents did not believe that the Germans
could really have changed their fundamental antisemitism, and there was
nothing of our own to return to in any case. They further believed that I,
in particular, would have a better chance to grow and develop in the US than
in post-war Germany. So we stayed in Morocco and continued to wait for our
quota numbers to come up. They finally did in 1948, 12 years after the
original application was filed. I graduated that June from the Lycee with
what was then called the Brevet Elementaire, a degree approximately
equivalent to a US high school diploma. My father sold his business, our
little furniture, and the key to the garconniaire. We packed our few
belongings (not much more than what we had when we arrived 8 years earlier),
and left in late October. We sailed from Gibraltar on the �Vulcania�, an
Italian liner traveling regularly between Naples and New York.
We arrived in New York on November 8, 1948. It was quite cold, the
first cold weather we had experienced in over 8 years. We were greeted by
representatives of the JOINT, who placed us in a hotel on 103rd
and Broadway reserved for Displaced Persons until we could find a place of
our own. We were also greeted by my mother�s cousins, the same ones with
whom we had stayed in Hamburg in 1939 and who had escaped to Shanghai. They
arrived in the US a year or so before us. They lived in Irvington, NJ and,
as it happened, there was a vacant apartment in their building. We moved in
that December. While still in New York, I visited Columbia University with
the intent of enrolling for the January 1949 semester; I was, as it turned
out, totally ignorant about the application process. But that
notwithstanding, the registrar thought that my French degree was not really
equivalent to an American high school diploma and suggested that I should
attend a high school here first, graduate, and then apply for admission in
the Fall. I followed his advice and enrolled in the local, Irvington, NJ
high school. That experience was my first, real, personal cultural shock: I
had met the American teen-ager! He was very different from me, freshly
disembarked from the Old World. I was very na�ve by comparison. My new
classmates dressed differently than I was used to (think of �Happy Days� on
TV!), they spent money, they drove cars and, especially, they dated! All the
girls were �pinned� � boys and girls were pairs! Indeed, in these respects,
they were much more �grown-up� than I, now almost 17 years old; but in other
respects, they were rather less sophisticated, informed and serious than my
former classmates. I was also rather surprised that I could elect my
courses. At the lycee, our curriculum had been preset and definitive. I
attended Irvington HS for one semester, got my diploma, applied to Rutgers
University, and was admitted to its Newark College of Arts and Sciences. I
enrolled in September 1949 as a pre-med student and emerged with a B.Sc. in
December 1953. I skipped the Fall semester of my second year to work, for
lack of sufficient funds for tuition. Indeed, from our arrival in the US, I
had to help the family budget by working part-time during the school year
and full-time during vacations. While at Rutgers, I also had to apply every
semester for deferment from military service, as universal military training
was in effect then and, moreover, the Korean War had begun on June 25, 1950.
There was no problem in my obtaining this deferment so long as I was in
school, but when I graduated at mid-school year, in December rather than
June, it became an immediate problem. That is, to avoid being drafted
immediately, I had to continue in school without any break � waiting until
the next Fall semester was not an option as far as my draft board was
concerned.
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You studied medicine
at the University of Iowa. Can you explain the reasons for your choice
of University?
The issue for me then became: what did I really want to do
professionally? In the Lycee in Morocco, we were exposed to a different
science course every year. During our fourth year, we were taught Human
Anatomy and Physiology. The teacher was super and inspired me to think about
medicine as a possible career. The choice I now had to make, as I understood
my options, was whether I wanted to practice medicine in a clinical setting
or become a biomedical researcher in an academic setting. My professors were
frankly encouraging me toward research. I must admit that I rather liked the
image of myself as a university professor, on campus in perpetuity. Academic
life, as I witnessed it then (but, sadly, is no more) seemed peaceful,
independent and rewarding. I therefore applied to various graduate schools
recommended by my professors and was accepted by several; but the programs
of all except two began in September. Those two were Microbiology at UCLA
and Physiology at Iowa. I was not too keen on Microbiology although Los
Angeles attracted me. I preferred Physiology but was dubious about Iowa �
out there somewhere in the wilds of the Midwest. As it happened, the Fall
meetings of the American Physiological Society that year (we haven�t had
Fall meetings for years now!) were held at Princeton. The head of the Iowa
department was attending that meeting, and he decided to interview me on his
return trip through Newark. But he did not let me or anyone else know of his
intentions in advance, so that, when he arrived on our campus, I was not
there (I was at work at my job). When I learnt of his visit the next day, I
was sure I had blown my opportunity. However, he did meet several of my
biology professors who evidently recommended me well, so that a few days
later I received a letter of acceptance from him. And that is how I chose
Iowa!
It was very cold and snowing when I arrived in Iowa City that January
1954. The chairman whom I had missed in Newark, Dr. Harry M. Hines, welcomed
me warmly, told me a few things about the program and the department,
introduced me to a few faculty members and students, and finally led me to
my mentor-to-be, Dr. Steven M. Horvath. I had been awarded a research
assistantship, a stipend that covered my tuition and, more or less, my room
and board. This required that I work 20 hours a week in the lab. Of course,
the hours were never monitored and the idea was not to work, in the actual
sense, but rather to assist in the daily lab experiments when not actually
in class, and to learn all the procedures in use, for my own later benefit;
studying was done after the day�s work. I was completely inexperienced then,
of course, and had to learn everything from scratch. The experimental animal
of choice in the lab was the dog. I learned how to anesthetize dogs, intubate them, insert Foley catheters, cannulate arteries and veins,
catheterize the ventricles, the coronaries, and other deep vessels, perform
various surgeries, operate equipment, - pretty much all the techniques then
in use in the lab. There were two senior graduate students in the lab then
who both became distinguished physiologists later in their careers, Gerald
(�Jerry�) B. Spurr (Metabolism and Nutrition) and Lyle Hamilton
(Respiratory). There was also a post-doc who had earned his degree with
Steve, Don McCannon, who may be known to many readers as the long-term
grants manager of the NIH cardiovascular programs. And there were several
highly qualified assistants in the lab: Enid Allbaugh was the chief
technician and Bruce Hutt was Steve�s all-around research associate who had
come with him to Iowa from the University of Pennsylvania, Steve�s prior
job. All took me in stride and patiently taught me �the ropes�. While thus
in training, I was assigned a Master�s project (graduate students were then
required to obtain this degree before going on) � to classify the disparate
features of the dog�s coronary sinus pressure curves. This earned me the
M.Sc. degree, which I received in June 1955, and resulted in my first
research paper, which appeared in the American Heart Journal
(51: 306-313, 1956). My subsequent doctoral
project was quite different. It concerned the effects of hypothermia on the
dog�s renal function. I was able to complete this research in just about 2
years and received my Ph.D. in August 1957. On a personal level during my
stay at U of I, I became a naturalized American citizen in 1956, and in the
Fall of that same year, I met a beautiful, young, Peruvian charmer, Yolanda
Fuentes Barriga, soon after she enrolled at Iowa for a Master�s in Spanish.
We were married in March 1958 in Iowa City.
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After finishing medical school, you
were engaged with research for the army. What exactly was your research
topic and how did you happen to choose this topic?
Universal Military Training was still
in effect when I graduated. Within the month, I received my enlistment
orders, and within two months I was in The Army! After basic training as an
enlisted man at Ft. Dix, NJ, I was assigned to the US Army Medical Research
Laboratory (USAMRL) at Ft. Knox, KY, as a research technician (my enlisted
man military occupation specialty (MOS) was �Scientific and Professional�
[S&P]). Interestingly, Dr. Horvath had also been assigned to this Lab as an
officer during WWII, when it was called the US Army Armored Medical Research
Laboratory; it was then the institute that contributed most to our overall
understanding of men�s responses to heat exposure. USAMRL�s Commander was
Colonel J.R. Blair, USAMC; he was well known for his studies on frostbite in
Korea. The civilian Director of Research was Ray G. Daggs; he left shortly
after I arrived to become the Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the APS, a
position to which he had been named the year before, if I have my dates
right. I was assigned to the Division of Environmental Medicine; the
director was Dr. Tom R. A. Davis. Two months after my arrival at Ft. Knox,
I was commissioned First Lieutenant in the US Army Medical Service Corps and
functioned henceforth at a professional level. Several other physiologists
that became well known later were also serving their tour of duty in my
Division: Eugene D. Jacobson, Francis J. Haddy, and E.D. Frohlich. George
Molnar was also there, and Alan Keller and George Clark were both in the
Physiology Division, nearby. The scholarly environment was indeed exciting.
Although my thesis research was concerned with the kidney rather than
temperature regulation, my association with Dr. Horvath implied knowledge of
temperature regulation to a level that I did not really possess. But Dr.
Davis nevertheless assigned me to work with him on a study of the
acclimatory responses of soldiers to prolonged cold exposure. However,
shortly after the study began, I received a temporary duty (TDY) assignment
away and was therefore not further involved with it. My TDY was to the
Greenland Icecap, near the Magnetic North Pole, to investigate a case of
carbon monoxide poisoning there, among troops stationed in an under-the-ice
camp. Being a medical issue, it had been referred to the Surgeon General of
the Army who assigned it to our lab for resolution. It was also referred to
us so that we could survey the site as a possible venue for future cold
weather studies. I was detailed as the investigator, and two civilian
scientists followed later as the surveyors. It was now the early spring of
1958. The ice had not yet thawed, there were blinding, mostly wind-swept
snowstorms (�white outs�), but the sun was already shining around the clock.
This was my first exposure to constant daylight and it certainly was a novel
experience for the first 48 hours! After a few days spent shuttling between
Thule Air Force Base and our Army base camp at the very foot of the glacier,
I was flown to the camp under the ice. It was at an altitude of
approximately 10,000 ft. I had no previous idea that the ice cap was so
thick! I investigated the CO poisoning problem and, as was to be expected,
it was only due to inadequate ventilation in the camp. I recommended the
placement of additional ventilators at various, specific locations, the
redirection of the airflow to various chutes to the outside, and the problem
was solved. But in the Army it always is �hurry up and wait!� so that this
entire adventure took a little over two months. But I wouldn�t have missed
it for the world! How many people get the chance to visit the ice cap and
live in tunnels dug into the ice below its surface? The only regretable
thing about the whole trip was that I didn�t own a camera at that time and
have not a single picture. My civilian colleagues took pictures, even of me,
but neglected to give me prints later! If you guys are out there on the
Internet, please send them!
Soon after my return to Ft. Knox, I
was TDY�d for 2 months to Brooks Army Medical Center at Ft. Sam Houston, in
San Antonio, TX to receive training for my MSC officer�s MOS, ambulance
company commander. When I finally returned to Ft. Knox, Tom Davis gave me my
own lab space and two S&P servicemen for technical help, so that I could
undertake my own, first independent study. Because of the mission of the
lab, it naturally had to concern thermal physiology. This is the simple
reason why temperature regulation became my research field! I elected to
study the afferent signaling of shivering � whether it was cool blood
perfusing the hypothalamus or neural inputs from the periphery - a
controversial topic at the time. It was a lucky choice. The results resolved
the controversy (neural inputs) and led to the later discovery (by others)
of additional thermosensors within the body core, particularly in the spinal
cord. They were published in the American Journal of Physiology (199:
697-700, 1958) and, fortunately for me, noticed by some senior thermal
physiologists. Among them were Prof. Dr. Herbert Hensel, who was the head of
the Department of Physiology of the Phillips� University in Marburg,
Germany, a noted authority on thermoreceptors, and Prof. Dr. Rudolph Thauer,
the director of the Max Planck Institute for Physiological and Clinical
Research in Bad Nauheim, Germany, a famous thermophysiologist who had first
published on the topic of my paper in 1932, the year I was born! Both
subsequently were very instrumental in the further development of my career.
Overall, my 3 years at USAMRL were relatively productive, resulting in 11
papers; but none was as significant as the very first.
Two international meetings were held at
USAMRL during my years there, one on cold injury and the other on the short-
and long-term responses to cold exposure. Several of the �greats� in thermal
physiology attended, allowing me to meet in person, among others, Herbert
Hensel (before my first paper appeared), Ted Hammel, Sandy Hart, Nello Pace,
David Bass, Herbert Henschel, Larry Irving, and Alan Burton. Also, soon
after my return to Ft. Knox from Greenland, the first monkey launched into
space, �Able�, came to our lab after its return to earth for some
physiological studies. Pictures of this newsworthy event were published in
�Life� magazine.
By good fortune, I also had the opportunity
to teach physiology while in the military. The Universities of Louisville
and of Kentucky were then offering after-hours undergraduate courses, the
first on its campus in Louisville and the other at its extension at Ft.
Knox. I was lucky enough to land concurrent positions in both institutions
as adjunct instructor of physiology in the Departments of Biology and
Physiology, respectively. The significance of these appointments, besides
the practical teaching experience that I gained, was that my boss at
Kentucky was Loren Carlson, a well-known thermophysiologist who later moved
to the University of California-Davis, and that a student in one of my
classes at Louisville, Lorenz Lutherer, was evidently so smitten by my
lectures that he became a physiologist himself! He eventually earned his
Ph.D. with Mel Fregly at Florida and has been a professor at Texas Tech Med
School for years. He also worked with me at Natick (see later).
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Your research has taken you to
several different countries throughout South America. Would you like to
share some particularly interesting experiences you made abroad?
My tour of active military service ended in
March 1961. Two or three months before then, my name appeared on the list of
first lieutenants to be promoted to captain, but I was a civilian again
before my number came up. I felt insufficiently prepared immediately after
my discharge to assume an academic position and, truth be told, I also
needed a legitimate excuse to travel to Peru and meet my new parents-in-law.
A controversy at that time was whether high altitude acclimatization is an
inherent or an acquired phenomenon. It occurred to me that one approach to
studying this question could be to compare the cardio-respiratory changes
that occur at sea level and at altitude over the first month of life in the
newborns of species with distinct natural histories of residence at
altitude, born at sea level and at altitude - to wit dogs, llamas, horses,
sheep, pigs, and cattle. I contacted Dr. Alberto Hurtado, a highly respected
altitude physiologist and then the dean of the Faculty of Medicine of the
University of San Marcos and the director of the Institute of Andean
Biology, a component of the Faculty of Medicine. It was housed at the
Hospital Loayza, in Lima and staffed by the outstanding altitude
physiologists of that day. Dr. Hurtado thought that my proposal had merit
and accepted me. I also contacted Dr. Geoffrey S. Dawes, the director of the
Nuffield Institute at Oxford University, to pursue this research
subsequently at a more fundamental level. Dr. Dawes was one of the leading
neonatal physiologists in the world then. I actually don�t remember exactly
what I proposed � presumably it was based on my anticipated findings in
Peru. He accepted me too, whereupon I submitted an application to the NIH
for a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship, spending the first year at San Marcos
and the second at Oxford. It was awarded several months before my discharge,
so that we had plenty of time to get ready.
Peru was wonderful, not only because of the
warm welcome by my in-laws and family, but also because the work, the
environment, and the support I received were fantastic. Dr. Hurtado assigned
his two most experienced technicians to me, one or the other of whom always
accompanied me on my field trips. Indeed, we traveled from the coastal
desert to the highest peaks of the Andes to study our subjects. We measured
their vitals, collected samples of their blood and respiratory gases in
their native habitats, then analyzed them by Scholander, Van Slyke and pH
meter in makeshift labs we installed in a room at the farm of the animals�
owners; we also slept there, but ate with the owners. We returned to Lima
after each run at altitude to test the corresponding species at sea level or
to await the birth of the next set of animals at sea level or at altitude.
In brief, we found that altitude acclimatization was inherent in all
neonates, whether born at sea level or at altitude, and that those born at
seal level in essence de-acclimatized from altitude to sea level. The
reason: fetuses develop in utero in a hypoxic environment! Meanwhile, I
managed to catch both typhoid and paratyphoid fevers at the same time,
probably because I drank some unclean water while in Lauramarca, a vast
llama and alpaca farm near the Auzangate, the highest peak in Peru.
Fortunately, I had been vaccinated against these diseases while still in the
Army and, though I suffered great discomfort and lost a good deal of weight,
I was not the worst for it afterwards. While at the Institute, I had the
pleasure of making friends with both Drs. Carlos Monge, father and son (the
father was the founder of the Institute and the first to describe �soroche�
or mountain sickness), as well as with the other renowned altitude
physiologists there, such as Tulio Velasquez, Cesar and Baltazar Reynafarje,
Javier Arias-Stella, Dante Penaloza, Alberto Cazorla, G. Whittembury, Emilio
Picon-Reategui, and others. I also met some well-known respiratory
physiologists who came to work temporarily in Morococha, the high altitude
station of the Institute of Andean Biology, e.g., Donald Barron, S. Marsh
Tenney, Franz Kreuzer, and others.
We sailed from Peru to England in March of
1962. It was still quite cool when we arrived in Oxford. Dr. Dawes suggested
that I combine my new experience of altitude and newborns and my earlier one
of temperature regulation to study the effect of hypoxia on the thermogenic
response to cold of neonates. Interest was then just developing in brown
adipose tissue nonshivering thermogenesis (BAT NST) in neonates, a
phenomenon that was then also being explored by Robert E. Smith (with whom I
shared quite a bit of beer later!) in adult hibernators and cold-acclimated
rodents. I joined another Fellow, Dr. Julius Mestyan, an established
pediatrician and pathophysiologist from the Medical University of Pecs,
Hungary, who had already initiated studies on this topic, to learn the ropes
from him. I took over the project when he returned home a couple of months
later. My study was published in the Journal of Physiology in 1964 (172:358-368)
and extended, and eventually completed, by my successor in the lab, Dr.
David Hull.
We enjoyed Oxford very much. The
environment was very motivating. Indeed, my training, associations and
experiences there influenced the path of my research (in the sense of how I
planned and conducted it from then on) in a definitive way. To drop a few
names: the permanent staff (e.g., Gwen Barer, J. C. Mott, M. J. Dawkins) was
outstanding, and all the other fellows were very capable and stimulating
(e.g., Sydney Cassin, B. B. Ross, Colin Bloor, Julius Mestyan, Vladimir
Kovalcik, and David Hull, among others). There were also frequent
collaborating visitors (e.g., K. W. Cross, L. B. Strang, H. J. Shelley, R.
E. Moore, J. T. Reeves). Kurt Bruck, who was then also beginning his studies
on BAT NST, dropped by. Keith Cooper and Bill Keatinge were working in the
Regius Professor�s Department of Medicine, across the courtyard from us.
Elisha Atkins joined them for a 6-months sabbatical. I did not know then
that we would all have many contacts later on and become good friends. I
also met John West, John Bligh, and Tony Milton around that time.
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How did your interest in the
pathophysiology of fever develop?
Dr. Dawes had the custom of visiting each
Fellow�s work station most late afternoons and asking: �What have you
discovered today?� On one of those occasions, after I reported to him the
day�s results, he remarked that he wondered how hypoxia would affect the
febrile response of neonates. He then explained that, in fact, neonates did
not usually exhibit fever during infectious illnesses in the first days of
postnatal life, and that this was a serious problem in the diagnosis and
prognosis of neonatal infections. This comment intrigued me, stayed on my
mind, and eventually determined what became my research field for about 30
years. But nearly 8 years passed before I could begin that research.
Thus, during my year at Oxford, my former
boss at USAMRL, Dr. Davis, came by on his way to a meeting in Europe and
invited me to rejoin him after my fellowship at the Nuffield. His Division
at the Ft. Knox lab was about to be transferred to Natick, MA and combined
with another group there operated by the Quartermaster General of the Army.
Their research was directed at the effects of different types of clothing
(protective uniforms) and dietary nutrients, among other factors, on the
performance of soldiers in different environments. Several very good
environmental physiologists were working there � David Bass, Elwood Buskirk,
Pat Iampietro, Ralph Goldman, among others. The new lab was to be called the
US Army Institute for Environmental Medicine (USARIEM) and come under the
authority of the Surgeon General of the Army. China had meanwhile defeated
India in a brief war in the Himalayas, and the US Army Command had
consequently become very interested in the performance of soldiers at high
terrestrial altitudes, an environment that had not been studied in Defense
Department labs since WWII. Davis thought that my expertise was appropriate
to that new task and therefore wanted me to come to Natick with him to
undertake high altitude studies similar to those I was conducting in
neonates, i.e., on the effect of hypoxia on the response to cold, two
factors present in the natural environment of high terrestrial altitudes. I
accepted his offer and recruited Lori Lutherer to my new venture.
I spent three, relatively productive years
at Natick, contributing some new information on the mechanisms of the body�s
responses to combined cold and hypoxia; I won�t delve here on the specifics
of any of the studies - we published some 15 articles and reviews a long
time ago. The most interesting, career-pertinent events that occurred
during my tenure at USARIEM were: 1) Dr. Davis left the Institute within 6
months of my arrival due to a conflict of interest with the person named to
become the next civilian chief of the Institute, resulting in a somewhat
politically difficult, but fortunately not permanently so, situation for me;
2) I was charged with finding a location high in the Colorado Rockies
suitable for a study of the effects of altitude on the performance of
soldiers in a combat-like action (I scouted various sites with Dr. Bruno
Balke, then of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who knew the area
well, but I did not participate in the actual study for reason 4, below);
3) for the first time, I was an invited speaker in a symposium on aging and
the environment held at Ft. Wainwright, near Fairbanks, Alaska, chaired by
Bruce Dill and attended by various expert thermal and altitude
physiologists, including Hugo Chiodi, Robert Grover, Pat Hannon, Ralph
Brauer, Baltazar Reynafarje, Bengt Saltin, and others (my topic was the
newborn � doubly apropos!); and 4) I led a 9-months long study of Peruvian
soldiers and Andean natives at diverse altitudes in the Andes (my second
trip to Peru). This expedition was particularly interesting, not only
because of the research, but also because we were �official� visitors to
Peru, seconded to the Peruvian Army. This meant that we were temporarily
attached, with due privileges, to the US Embassy in Lima and, in particular,
to our Army Attache there. The Peruvian Army provided us with all the
logistical support we needed (�volunteers�, trucks and drivers, cooks and
utensils, quarters � in Lima, we were based a the Army�s General Hospital,
the Hospital Militar Central). I consequently also had personal contact with
the Peruvian Army�s Surgeon General and the General Staff. The Chief of the
latter, General Juan Velasco Alvarado, successfully managed a coup a few
months after our departure and thus became the next President of Peru!
The manner by which USARIEM
operated then was, however, somewhat frustrating to me. After two years
there, I concluded that I did not want to continue in the civil service, but
would prefer an academic career. Indeed, I would have left sooner had I not
meanwhile gotten approval for my proposed study in Peru; it was, I felt, an
opportunity too good to pass up despite all. But, after returning from Peru,
I did search for a position and eventually accepted an offer by the
Department of Physiology of the University of Tennessee Medical Units in
Memphis. Its head was then Dr. Nicholas DiLuzio, a leader in inflammation
research. I joined the Department as an associate professor in September
1966 and have been there ever since.
My first task was to update myself in all
the areas of physiology that I had neglected since my graduation, so that I
could at least be at the level of the graduate students then in the
Department and discharge my assigned teaching with acceptable efficacy. My
second task was to equip my first, really totally independent lab with the
start-up funds I had been given by the Department and, simultaneously, to
apply for extramural funds to support my intended research. This research
was to investigate, at last, the ontogeny of fever � the question raised by
Dr. Dawes. I had never written a NIH R01 grant application before, and,
reading it today, it was rather imperfect. But fortunately, funding was much
easier to get in those days. And that is how my research on the
pathophysiology of fever began!
Again, I shall not delve on the details of
my work over the years since all but the very last of it has been published
as of this date. I would only comment, by way of summarizing it, that it
consisted of a succession of studies, each based on the results of the
preceding in a longitudinal progression. They began with the description of
the postnatal development of pyrogenic sensitivity and the associated
changes in the thermogenic mechanism underlying fever production, then the
characterization of the overall acute-phase responses of the neonate as
compared to that of the adult; for various reasons described in my papers,
my experimental model for these studies was the guinea pig. As knowledge of
the neurobiology of body temperature was also then expanding, I began to
wonder, contemporaneously with four other workers elsewhere, as it turned
out, about the localization of the brain sites controlling fever and the
various neurochemical substances presumptively mediating it. These studies
eventually led me to the question that proved the most arduous and longest
to answer, viz., how is the brain informed that it should initiate a febrile
response? I.e., what is the afferent mechanism of pyrogen signaling? If I
may be allowed a little immodesty, our most noteworthy and novel
contributions to the solution of this problem were the following: 1) the
organum vasculosum laminae terminalis, a site where the blood-brain barrier
is �leaky� located in the middle of the preoptic area of the anterior
hypothalamus (which controls body temperature), could be a portal of entry
of endogenous pyrogens (fever-producing mediators) from the bloodstream into
the brain. Although this was verified by others in subsequent studies, I,
however, later had some doubts about this possibility, leading to: 2) our
confirming an earlier finding by Linda Watkins and Steve Maier that the
vagus could be an alternative, more rapid, periphery-to-brain signaling
pathway. Following up on this notion, we eventually showed that: 3) the
initial, peripheral trigger of endotoxic fever are not the cytokines
interleukin-1b,
-6 and/or tumor necrosis factor-a,
as was then current, but rather prostaglandin E2 elaborated by
hepatic macrophages (Kupffer cells) activated by complement component C5a
(produced by the activation of the complement cascade by the existent
bacterial lipopolysaccharide), exciting vagal afferents in the liver that
then convey the pyrogenic signal to the brain. We subsequently showed that:
4) norepinephrine consequently released in the preoptic area stimulates in a
two-step process the febrile response. and that: 5) nitric oxide, also then
released in the preoptic area, limits the release of norepinephrine, thus
acting as a central endogenous antipyretic. I must note in this context that
I was aided throughout these studies by exceptional students and post-docs
without whom I would have accomplished little, to wit: Jose Llanos-Quevedo,
Ning Quan, Maasaki Shibata, Li Xin, Andrej Romanovsky, Osamu Shido, Elmir
Sehic, Shuxin Li, Alexandre Steiner, Carlos Feleder, Zhonghua Li, and Vit
Perlik. I was also very fortunate to have from time to time various
established collaborators in the lab, e.g., Reinhold Necker, Miklos Szekely,
Osamu Shido, Bill Hunter, and others. Finally, I should admit that, as
almost always in science, not all my findings have gone unchallenged! But we
are confident of our results.
Before closing this chapter, I would like
to add that this very month, August 2007, marks the 50th
anniversary of my Ph.D. degree and that all these 50 years have been immense
fun and very rewarding personally. As my career advanced and, little by
little, earned some recognition for me, I was privileged to meet, interact
and, in many instances, develop enduring friendships with colleagues
world-wide. I had the good fortune to be awarded fellowships to teach or
conduct research in various countries � Peru, Mexico, Australia, and others
- allowing me to live for a time in different parts of the world. Another
wonderful perk was that I was eventually invited to present seminars,
participate in national and international symposia, even to organize such
symposia, as well as to be nominated to various national and international
committees and councils. Among these, my service on various committees of
the American Physiological Society was particularly meaningful and my
appointments first as a member, then as chairman of the Commission on
Thermophysiology of the International Union of Physiological Sciences and
later of the Scientific Council of the Max Planck Institute for
Physiological and Clinical Research were, for me, the most consequential. I
was especially moved by the latter appointment, given my antecedent
experience under the Nazis regime. In this regard, I was also twice
visiting professor of physiology at the Phillips University in Marburg,
Germany. I also prized very much my co-editorship with Mel Fregly of the
American Physiological Society�s Handbook of Physiology, Section
4:Environmental Physiology and my 6-year associate-editorship of the American Journal of Physiology: Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative
Physiology. I am indeed very grateful and feel very honored that I was
handed such a nice �deck� to play this �game�.
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Seeing your biography, it appears
that very little of one�s future is actually planable. To our younger
readers, would you recommend extensive career planning or choosing a
research topic according to one�s gut feeling?
There is really no hard and fast rule. It
depends on the individual, I would think. My own path may not have been
prototypical, yet I doubt that it varied significantly from that of most
other investigators. Thus, many young graduates choose postdoctoral programs
somewhat in line with their predoctoral training, lest they be fish out of
water in their new lab. There, they acquire new perspectives, skills and
knowledge, and most commonly these determine the research that they will
undertake independently. They then join a department that seeks their
expertise and, hopefully, also includes at least one member with a similar
interest. The rest is entirely up to them. Their continuing studies will
presumably be guided by the results of each preceding one, as in my case.
The important thing is not to become discouraged by results not in accord
with their hypothesis, but, in that case, to re-examine the methods and/or
experimental design and, if need be, the hypothesis itself; and to be
willing, if the latter were indeed faulty, to revise it or give it up
entirely and move on to another question. Curiosity, a sincere dedication
to scholarly research, flexibility, and perseverance are, in my view, vastly
superior for achieving and advancing to extensively planning one�s career
and setting benchmarks. Things seldom work out quite the way they were
planned anyway�. But one should also recognize that things around us change
with time, e.g., the increased emphasis on molecular biology and de-emphasis
of integrative in vivo physiology we have witnessed over the past
several years. It is therefore beneficial also to be pragmatic and
adaptable. That is to say, not to yield one�s preferred research to the next
popular band wagon, but rather to keep up to date with the new and apply the
most relevant of it to one�s own work.
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Which current developments of
physiology do you find are particularly promising and which developments do
you feel are less beneficial?
Being a classically trained physiologist,
I have always snobbishly believed that all biological science is
�physiology�, no matter what the name of the discipline, if it involves the
study of normal function at any level or in any species. By this criterion,
therefore, all developments in all the fields of physiology are beneficial!
Indeed, the current, vast array of innovative techniques in molecular and
cellular biology, immunology, genetics, proteomics, anatomical tracing,
imaging, biophysics, electrophysiology, and others has unquestionably
enabled new discoveries that have significantly increased our understanding
of fundamental processes. But, to my mind, a less beneficial, but presumably
originally unintended consequence of these specialized techniques has been
that their successful practice has resulted in a radical change in the
emphasis of physiological research, with the formation of new branches with
different approaches, standards, and priorities. Unfortunately, also in my
view, this shift has furthermore resulted in the decline of less �modern�
areas of research, e.g., whole animal and organ system research; and in
these times of intense competition for scarce financial resources, this has
even created, in some instances, conflicts of interest rather than
collaborations among fields. It has also become increasingly difficult to
integrate all the benefits of the new discoveries because, although
they have informed us greatly about the capacity of cells and cell systems
to react to stimuli under the generally static, in vitro conditions of most
such studies, they have revealed less about how cells and systems actually
perform under the dynamic, in vivo conditions of everyday activities.
Indeed, I would even go so far as to say that there is a risk that the new
technology of science, meritorious as it may be, could supersede the
conceptual principles of science! This is where the �old� physiology comes
in. It is thus important that, to be applicable, the widening gulf between
these new findings and their relevancy to bodily functions be narrowed by
re-emphasizing the value of whole animal research and, consequently, by
supporting it. There are some signs that this need may now be appreciated,
e.g., �translational� research. However, more enthusiasm and commitment are
required. Indeed, a return to preparing �classical� physiologists is a
necessity, in my view, for the continued health of both medical research and
medical education.