Barbara Horwitz
75th President of APS

As originally published in The Physiologist
Volume 45, Number 2, April 2002, page 87

  I am greatly honored to serve as the 75th president of the American Physiological Society, and I thank you for the privilege and the challenge of doing so. As has been pointed out by previous presidents, each of us begins our presidential year with a written message to the membership. Recent presidents have discussed the strong financial state of the APS, the outstanding and dedicated staff of the society, the role that the APS has played in supporting its members with its publications, meetings, and public affairs, and a vision of where the discipline of physiology and the APS is (or should be) headed (1, 3-7). While I, too, will touch on some of these areas, I would like to focus on the latter because it is a major driver of the primary goal that I have as President—namely, to establish vehicles that will help attract the best students, teachers, and scientists to the physiological sciences and to the APS.

Today’s physiology is not your father’s physiology.
    The tools that are available to study functional biology (physiology) today are beyond anything that many of us envisioned when we began our first experimental studies. Our ability to examine physiological processes has increased enormously with the development of powerful methodologies that span the levels of biological organization—from biochemical techniques that allow us to look at individual molecules to functional imaging which permits us to peek into the intact organism, to the use of transgenic/knockout animals as model systems. Yet the goals that underlie physiological approaches remain the understanding of how cells, organs, and organisms function in their “normal” environment, how they deal with environmental perturbations and stressors, and how homeostatic processes can go awry. The opportunities to understand the underlying mechanisms of these processes and how they are regulated have never been greater and, as a result, studying physiology has never been more exciting. 
    This view notwithstanding, many students and some of our scientific colleagues are unaware of the breadth of physiology and the significance of the research in which we are engaged. Newer disciplines have captured their attention and many, if they think of physiology at all, may think of it as stodgy. While we can argue that these perceptions are invalid, it is more useful to focus our energies on changing them. This is one of my key goals for the APS, and one that I hope will engage our Sections as well as our Committees. 
    The APS has already taken steps to increase public awareness of physiology, the significance of physiological research, and the Society itself. In 2001, we hired the Krupa group and an in-house Communications Specialist to help publicize reports from the Society’s journals, APS conferences, and the Experimental Biology meeting; we have begun to provide news releases to local newspapers when area teachers, students, and researchers win APS awards, and we have established a Communications Committee to recommend other efforts to raise the visibility of physiology. While these actions may not make physiology a household word, they should help to increase awareness of the activities of the Society and its members.
Reaching students requires a different strategy. Our Education office, through its Frontiers in Physiology and Explorations in Biomedicine programs has, for a number of years, focused on K-12 science teachers, providing them with a summer research experience in active physiology laboratories, helping them develop classroom exercises for their students, and making available a variety of curricular resources for their use. Many of those who have participated are “master teachers” who return to their districts and “spread the word” to other teachers with whom they interact. Although we don’t know if this program has increased the number of students interested in studying physiology, it is likely to have had a positive effect of their view of physiology. 
    In concert with the 2000 Strategic Plan, we have also begun to reach out to undergraduates with the APS Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowships. This summer’s class of 12 will be the third to participate in this program which is designed to encourage talented undergraduates to pursue graduate training in the physiological sciences by introducing them to an exciting research experience. 
    But there is more that we can do. We can make the APS website the premier place to find out what’s new and exciting about physiology. Our Sections are an obvious resource, and I will be asking them to help provide content for a “What’s New in Physiology” site. In addition, the Careers Committee and the Education Office have begun to develop vignettes, member profiles, and case studies to illustrate the richness and excitement of research in physiology. These examples will be designed with input from the Sections and will have increasing complexity as they are directed to different audiences.
    Another strategy for conveying the excitement and diversity of modern physiology that I intend to explore is the creation of a “Speakers Bureau” whose members would be willing to discuss their research with students/faculty at local undergraduate institutions. This would complement the web-based instructional resource site that the Education Committee is currently developing. We are already reaching out to teachers of undergraduate physiology courses via our interaction with members of the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society (HAPS) at their annual meeting where APS sponsors an update lecture. This year, I will be meeting with a focus group of these instructors to discuss ways to promote physiology and physiological research to their students. 
    While it is difficult to know how effective the above programs will be, they all hold a promise for increasing the appreciation of physiology in the eyes of students as well as the public. 

The Translational Research Initiative
    Our new initiative on Translational Research, which was part of the 2000 Strategic Plan, should also enhance the visibility of physiology to students, colleagues, and the public as it reinvigorates the bi-directional transfer of ideas and information between the basic sciences and clinical medicine. Under the stewardship of President John Hall, we have established a Task Force with objectives that include highlighting translational research in our publications and our meetings, encouraging the development of interdisciplinary research teams that bridge molecular, cellular, and organ systems physiology with clinical research, promoting translational research as a viable career option for physiologists, and increasing the impact of physiology on medical and postgraduate medical education. We have already begun work on these objectives. Our journal editors have called for the submission of translational research manuscripts. APS is sponsoring symposia at the American Society of Nephrology and the American Gastroenterology Association. The Publications Committee has negotiated renewal of the “Physiology in Medicine” series in the Annals of Internal Medicine; the Program Committee continues to encourage and support cross-sectional, cross-society bench-to-bedside programming, and the Education Committee has initiated the development of a resource repository that could facilitate the integration of physiology with clinical medicine teaching. 
    These actions represent a fine start, but successful implementation of our objectives will require a prolonged effort. As John Hall pointed out in his 2001 presidential message (5), the importance of translational research has been emphasized not only by the National Institutes of Health, but by the American Cancer Society, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the American Heart Association. 
    Physiology has traditionally played a major role in translational research. The striking advances in both information and methodologies that are now available to physiologists open a new level of exploration where interactions relevant to current clinical problems can be viewed from a totally new perspective. Armed with an understanding of both homeostasis and cutting-edge techniques, physiologists are well-positioned to bridge highly specialized reductionist and clinical disciplines. While the APS, with input from its Sections, has an opportunity to provide a long-term blueprint for re-emphasizing the relationship between physiology and medicine, in the final analysis, our success will depend on efforts emanating, not from the top, but from our individual members.

Enhancing the excellence of our publications and our meetings.
    Providing a venue for scientific communication via meetings and publications is, for many, the raison d’etre for a professional society. In this regard, the APS is fortunate. Our journals encompass the breadth of physiology, representing traditional and emerging fields of study, as well as pedagogical issues, and our meetings provide programming for both the generalist as well as the specialist. While all is not perfect, the trajectory is positive. 
Publications. Our newest journal, Physiological Genomics, is launched and is finding its niche. Its establishment reflects the vision of Past President Allen Cowley (3) and its increasing stature owes much to the commitment of subsequent presidents and Councils, the members of the Publications Committee, and its editors. Our other journals are respected and faring well. Most have increased their impact factor since 1998 (the first year we had such data available), are publishing more articles, and have enhanced selectivity (as indexed by rejection rate). Physiological Reviews retains its place as an elite review journal, with the highest impact factor of all of our publications. Credit for these strengths can be attributed to many—our editors, our reviewers, and our outstanding APS staff. But most critical are those of you who send your best work to be published in APS journals. 
    Enhancing excellence in our journals requires continuous vigilance and effort and is more challenging than a cursory glance would suggest. Difficulties in establishing a financially responsible publication policy are exacerbated by uncertainties associated with the rapid growth of electronic publishing and the negative consequences of poor choices—a misstep is much more treacherous today than in the past because consequences can occur so rapidly. Nonetheless, the APS has recognized the enormous advantages of electronic publishing and has been aggressively moving its journals online. Additionally, electronic submission and reviewing has expanded with the establishment of APS Central, making these processes more rapid and efficient. As soon as manuscripts are accepted, authors may authorize their appearance on-line as Articles in PresS, and there is now a mechanism whereby readers can browse reviews from a single APS journal or from within them all. 
    These advances, which are just a few examples of changes made possible by the foresight and efforts of the members of our Publications Committees and the APS staff, serve not only our members, but the greater scientific community by providing enhanced access to our studies and our ideas. To extend this accessibility to pre-1996 publications, the APS is embarking on a “legacy” project which will put back issues of all of the Society’s journals online. We are beginning with the 1986-96 volumes of the American Journal of Physiology, with plans to include all volumes back to Volume 1 (1898). This will dramatically increase the visibility of earlier work, especially for graduate and undergraduate students who have become used to electronic access to information. 
Meetings. Just as the excellence of our journals depends on the quality of the published papers, the value of our meetings relies on the strength of programming. As the APS has grown in membership and in diversity of interests, structuring our meetings to meet the needs of this diversity has been a challenge. During the past few years, a series of recommendations that began with a Blue Ribbon Panel report commissioned by Allen Cowley have been implemented to improve our annual meeting (Experimental Biology) and membership attendance. Perhaps the major change has been to give direct control of the programming to Section representatives who now sit on the Joint Program Committee. These representatives bring their members’ proposals for symposia, lectures, workshops, and focused topics to the table for discussion and programming. This shift to the grass-roots of the Society and the ability to submit late-breaking abstracts two months before the meeting has increased the timeliness and the vigor of Experimental Biology. 
A    nother shift that has begun in the programming of Experimental Biology (APS’ annual meeting) is a greater emphasis on cross-sectional and cross-societal programs. One major advantage of a large meeting like Experimental Biology is its breadth. This provides an opportunity to learn from experts in fields that may be only peripherally related or even new to your own. For example, my research area deals with the regulation of energy balance and our current work focuses on mechanisms underlying the alterations in this regulation during the onset and progression of obesity, as well as during biological aging. The opportunity to interact with physiologists, pharmacologists, nutritionists, and biochemists working at different levels of biological organization and in such areas as diverse as neural control and mitochondrial oxidative damage has been immensely valuable to me. Attending a meeting such as Experimental Biology or its equivalent (which I have done each year since I was a graduate student) has made it easier to remain current in topics needed for a broad perspective. 
    Breadth, however, must be accompanied by depth, and the challenge is to construct a meeting program which offers both. The meetings-within-a-meeting concept attempts to do this, and I believe with a significant degree of success. Here the importance of member input in recommending topics for programming cannot be overemphasized. One of my goals as President is to promote greater participation within this framework. 
    Another mechanism whereby the Society has tried to foster depth is through the APS conferences. These conferences are focused on specific topics (the latest one being “Physiological Genomics of Cardiovascular Disease: From Technology to Physiology,” held in San Francisco). Although the science at these conferences has been excellent, attendance at some has been disappointing. There are several reasons why this may be the case (e.g., cost, venue, timing), and I hope that during this next year we will identify these reasons and find ways to circumvent them. 

Strategic Planning and Member Input
    I have touched only briefly on various aspects of APS initiatives. The APS Strategic Planning Document (2) lays out an ambitious series of goals that relate to the role that the Society can play in strengthening the discipline of physiology. I, like previous presidents, believe that strategic planning is an ongoing exercise—one in which we must continually assess what we have achieved and where we need to go. Goals change as opportunities and challenges arise. I am optimistic about the future of physiology and its importance for the discoveries and the applications that will be forthcoming in the life sciences. I am enthusiastic about the opportunity to work with you, and I invite you to send me your ideas and suggestions for improving Society activities, as well as for promoting physiology as an exciting scientific discipline that will have special relevance in the 21st century. 

References
1 Boron, W.F. “72nd President of APS.” The Physiologist 42: 65, 74-79, 1999.
2. Boron, W.F. “The APS Strategic Plan—A Vision for the New Millennium.” The Physiologist 43: 71-74, 2000.
3. Cowley, A.W. Jr. “70th President of APS.” The Physiologist 40: 49, 58-64, 1997.
4. Di Bona, G.F. “73rd President of APS.” The Physiologist 43: 57, 66-70, 2000.
5. Hall, J.E. “74th President of APS.” The Physiologist 44: 65, 74-79, 2001.
6. Navar, L.G. “71st President of APS.” The Physiologist 41: 65, 74-80, 1998.
7. Schafer, J.A. “69th President of APS.” The Physiologist 39: 41, 45-55, 1996.