News From Senior Physiologists

As originally published in The Physiologist
Volume 45, Number 3, June 2002, page 161-163

Letter to Karlman Wasserman
Adelbert Ames writes: “Thank you for your letter of some months ago, which only now resurfaced on my desk. I very much doubt if my recent activities could pass peer review for publication in The Physiologist. Though I follow with amazement from here in the foothills of Vermont the accelerating progress in our understanding of how living things work, more of my attention has been devoted to a chain saw and a cutterbar behind the tractor. As a consequence, I’ve seen little of fellow physiologists, though I have recently read quite a lot of their works in the course of writing a review (published last winter) on the energy requirements of brain function. I would be delighted to discuss such problems (and anything else) with any physiologists who might be passing by.”

Letter to G. Edgar Folk
Peter Macklem writes: “I apologize for taking so long to answer your kind letter of October 15. I am enjoying pseudo-retirement by spending my winters in Italy working with a group of outstanding bioengineers from the Politecnico di Milano. They, Andrea Aliverti, Raffaele Dellaca and Antonio Pedotti have developed a new technology called optoelectronic plethysmography. With this system a large number of reflective markers are placed over the surface of the chest wall. Each is tracked continuously in 3D by videocameras and a parallel processing computer reconstructs the chest wall and any of its compartments one cares to analyze. It’s the answer, not to a maiden’s dream perhaps, but to those of us who dream about measuring breathing when it’s difficult to do so, it’s an equivalent. Using the system it’s possible to measure all the parameters of ventilation, including changes in absolute lung volume, on a breath-by-breath basis, without either mouth piece or noseclip. It can be used during phonation, wind instrument playing, while sleeping, as a monitoring device in the ICU, in infants at risk for SIDS and so forth.

    “It is pure coincidence that my wife, Joy and I head to Italy when the Canadian winter becomes unbearable and that we return home at wildflower time. We now live on the shore of the St. Lawrence River in the 1,000 Islands. Of course, I never sacrifice the time I need to analyze the experiments performed in Italy in order to sail, swim, or go cruising.

    “Like many other physiologists, I am dismayed that biologists these days seem to think that how molecules and cells behave is somehow more important than how humans function; that academic promotions are often based on the impact factors of the journals one publishes in; that the papers published in journals with the highest impact factors are usually chosen by investigators who believe that the science of molecules is more important than the science of whole animals; that this creates a feed-forward mechanism whereby cell and molecular biologists get promoted to positions of power and prestige where they can ensure that papers in cell and molecular biology continue to predominate in journals with the highest impact factors; that this guarantees perpetual pre-eminence of reductionist science at the expense of integrative biology.

    “I do not wish to denigrate in any way the stunning successes of cell and molecular biology, but we should have a better balance. Perhaps it’s a good time to be pseudo-retired.” 

Letters to Felix Bronner
Edward Freis writes: “Thank you and thank the American Physiological Society for remembering my 90th birthday. I am in reasonably good health and still interested in the physiology of the circulation. I have recently published a review of some of my studies in the journal Hypertension, 2001, 118, 1-5.

    “I suspect that my longevity can be attributed to good genes and also to a low saturated fat diet and maintenance of my blood pressure at about 120/80 mm Hg. I have three wonderful children and a dear friend who keep in constant touch and take turns in taking me out to dinner. I have six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren who are my pride and joy.”

Martin Gold writes: “Thank you for your letter. Time creeps along and suddenly 70 years have passed into history.
    “I became 12 in July 1944 and in August caught poliomyelitis. After five years in three hospitals and five orthopedic operations, I came home, a quadriplegic with crutches, leg braces and a wheelchair.
    “Still, I graduated with a BS in chemistry from The Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science at 22. Then I attended Hahnemann Medical College, receiving my MS and PhD, working on enzyme properties under Peter Oesper.
    “I stayed on for eight years in the Department of Physiology, with John Spitzer, studying fatty acid metabolism. Then I moved to the Philadelphia Geriatric Center, researching the difference in brain metabolism in young and old rats after behavioral training.
    
    “My physiology training stood me in good stead as I became director of clinical chemistry at Nazareth Hospital. I published papers on drug metabolism in patients who overdosed their medications. I moved to Mercer Medical Center (Trenton, NJ) as Director of the Clinical Chemistry Laboratory, and finally as Quality Assurance Coordinator for the Department of Laboratory Medicine. 

    “My working days closed prematurely due to post-polio syndrome and I retired in 1995. My muscles have continued to weaken and I do not get out much. I never married, and have full-time help for daily living. I fill my time reading scientific literature and science fiction, which I enjoy.

    “Looking back on my career, I am pleased with what I was able to accomplish under difficult circumstances, and I am grateful to all the wonderful people who helped me do it.”

Letter to Novera Herbert Spector
James Scheuer writes: “I am replying to your letter related to the fact that I was born in 1931 and requesting information about my current activities. 

    “From 1987 through 1999, I chaired the Department of Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center. I voluntarily stepped down from that position and took a six-month sabbatical at the National Heart and Lung Institute in London, England in order to update some of my physiologic skills. There I worked with Dr. Sian Harding who is an expert in isolated cardiomyocyte physiology and pharmacology. On returning to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, I set up a similar laboratory facility so as to be able to study contractile activity and calcium cycling in isolated myocytes. We are exploring these relationships in various transgenic models. Getting back into the laboratory and dealing with younger and more modern scientists after a long stint as an administrator and educator is an exciting way to end one’s career.

    “My words of wisdom for younger researchers are to focus on investigation. A career in biomedical inquiry has never been more exciting nor more promising. Administration and education also have great rewards, but if you are trained as a scientist, nothing is more stimulating.”

Letters to Michael Barany
Robert Doty writes: “The arrival of the elegant memento from President Hall attesting to my 50th year as a member of the American Physiological Society has vigorously reminded me of my long languishing promise to you to write a few words in my new role as a ‘Senior Physiologist.’ Your greetings last year for my 80th Birthday, and invitation to write, arrived just as I was finishing a grant application, and leaving for three weeks in China. Thankfully, the latter was far more successful than the application. Yunnan is fascinating, both for its great diversity of indigenous peoples and its spectacular scenery. There was also a visit to the Woolong Panda Research Center, where I learned of the strange gastrointestinal and other physiology of this poor carnivore living on an herbivorous diet. I made great use of my digital camera, with some 500 (!) pictures; so much easier to manipulate with software than with chemistry.
    
    “Some research doings have been successful. Study Sections in their general wisdom took me out of the split-brain macaque business, so that I no longer have to face long hours of exacting surgery, or the other rigors of training these clever animals, so well-endowed with visual memory not too different from our own. So, we now work with the ultimate primate, and have just submitted a paper using fMRI to study hemispheric differences in frontal lobe activity for remembering words versus nonverbalizable images. The lab has several other human experiments going, examining the time it takes to transfer attention from one to the other cerebral hemisphere.

    “My main activity, however, has been in writing a joint, ‘on-line’ autobiography with my now departed wife. This arose when I was called upon to write a scientific autobiography for volume 3 of the Society for Neuroscience series. In doing so my attention was drawn to the nearly daily letters my beloved and I had exchanged during the four years that I was in the army; and in addition she kept a daily diary throughout her life. For the first 10 years of our marriage I have transcribed, using speech recognition software, 1.25 million words, and have now edited it down to 280,000 words, 2 volumes if I ever get it published. It is a uniquely veridical record of intense romance, travelogue, war, philosophy, poetry, and our occasional but bitter quarrels. I am becoming a sociologist as well as physiologist! But of course I am also driven by a deep nostalgia for the incomparably beautiful 58 years we spent together, a success whose roots and workings are so vividly depicted in our words as we lived it. I mourn her deeply, yet at the same time I am so blessedly aware of having with her experienced a life supreme in all fulfillment.”

Mary E. Carsten writes: “Thank you for your birthday wishes and your inquiry about my activities and words of wisdom. I have always thought that the best thing to do is to continue what you have been doing or at least to continue with your routine as much as possible. 

    “I am still going to UCLA every day. While I do not have a laboratory anymore to explore Ca2+ transport in smooth muscle sarcoplasmic reticulum, I still have a small office with computer literature and attend lectures. Thus, I edited a book on smooth muscle and wrote the chapter on the endocrinology of pregnancy and parturition for our textbook for medical students and presently revising it. 

    “Outside interests have also been calling. Thus, I go swimming almost every day. This is not only because I like it but also to keep me healthy. The university has an Olympic size outdoor swimming pool and every morning one meets interesting people there, most of them in similar situations as myself.

    “Since my retirement I have been traveling a lot. One of my wishes came true: a safari to Africa (Kenya). Other than that my preferred countries were France and Scotland, with repeated trips to both. And I have kept up my interest in collecting art objects and have made frequent visits to museums, art galleries and exhibits. 

    “As to words of wisdom to young scientists: Through all trials and tribulations, setbacks, long working hours, never give up. Be the best you can be.” 

Bella T. Altura writes: “It was a surprise and honor indeed to have received your kind letter of January 11, on behalf of my recent birthday, and I thank you for your kind compliments of my research contributions.
I enjoy reading news from senior scientists, but never expected to be called upon to participate. So here goes: it has been great fun and a joy for me to be able to contribute to science in general, and physiology in particular, throughout the years, without having to have the repetitive and rather nerve-wracking chore of writing a research grant, as that job was usually done by my beloved husband. He has let me tinker in the lab to my heart’s content, has let me write those papers which I wanted to write, has let me “correct” his writings and interact, criticize or applaud his thoughts, and patiently listened to my ideas, when they were worthwhile. He has been a great teacher to me in that he let me make my own mistakes and heart my frustrations through complaints, when things did not work out as expected. In addition, I have to say, that I have been lucky in our department as I was asked to teach only that which I felt comfortable in teaching and was not stuffed in committees I did not wish to attend, (perhaps out of fear by the powers that be, to have to listen to Burt’s protests), but nevertheless, the result was to my satisfaction! 

    “At this time I have semi-retired so that I can still work in the lab to follow my scientific interests, but have time to smell the roses, read and write, and occasionally play with our two-year old granddaughter, the wonder of our life. 

    “To young lady scientists I would say be careful in choosing a mate; it is not so important how many prizes you win, but how successful you are, in every day life, to be able to do that which you wish to do.” 

Valentin Popa writes: “Thank you very much for your kind letter of congratulation on my 70th birthday.

    “At age 70, I am active and happy with my life. I am now in private practice (internal medicine, allergy and pulmonary) but the impetus is not financial: I have fun with the riddles of medicine and draw immense satisfaction from helping a suffering man. I am not doing that as relaxed, intermittent academic rounds, but as busy, daily clinical work. I work harder than in my residency years, juggling office and hospital practice plus two on-call schedules. For instance, I am on duty one workday a week and two to three weekends a month. In one of the four hospitals that I cover, I may consult on or admit an average of 15 patients per weekend.

    “This is not all. Some of the fun comes from my research in the clinical aspects of the immunoglobulin deficiency. This is totally different from my previous field of interest, the immunopharmacology of the airways. For me, it is rewarding and also amusing that part of my best research came after age 60 and in a field that I had not explored before. It is about IgG subclass deficiency in adults and the role of immunoglobulins in interstitial lung diseases. This clinical research involves articles, presentations, editorials and seminars at national meetings.

    “Unfortunately, the pleasure of being active at age 70 is spoiled by the current HMO-driven medical practice. To understand why I write about it in this letter, think about the Cato the Elder who used to bring up the destruction of Carthagena regardless of the topic of his speech (‘et Carthaginam delendam esse’). In Sacramento, the capital city of HMO/independent practice association (IPA), the practice tends to be frustrating, almost depressing. The public feels that ‘gate-keeping’ keeps him out of good quality medicine. The practicing physician suffers from the convoluted formalities involved in health care and the progressive deterioration of collegial atmosphere; the latter is unavoidable when the competition is for contracts rather than quality of care. Also, if the previous clinical mentors pounded on the individuality of the patient and advised us to use medical judgment, the ‘leaders’ of HMO/IPA emphasize the uniformity of each disease and preach an uniform approach (pathways) for the ‘lives’ entrusted to them. For these and other reasons, it is not surprising that physicians tend to emigrate from rather than immigrate to California. As a practicing physician but also a current and former teacher, my frustration as a practitioner gains an added academic dimension. I am bewildered that in certain training programs in primary care, the accent is not on original thinking and referenced opinions—which develop competent physicians— but teaching will inevitably develop generic, scientifically de-personalized physicians aiming to care for generic patients.

    “Luckily, life is more than a profession. As many others, I have a hobby, music, and I go to church. I am a happy father and a happy husband. My daughter is an editor in San Francisco and got married last year. My wife is active (distinguished librarian) and has just finished writing a book. I like to travel and I intend to do so for as long as I can. It is a spiritual and humbling experience to listen in Wuhan, China to the bells used to make music around 400 AC with a seven-note scale. Or in Burma, to see how men of any age could go in a Buddhist monastery, meditate and learn for weeks, months or years and then return to their usual life. Or to watch the Burning Bush in St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. Drawing humility from travel may infuse wisdom in our daily life and prepare us for the Long Voyage.

    “I wish you success in your endeavors and great health to enjoy them!”

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