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Senior Physiologists' News |
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Letter to Charles Tipton James S. Wiley writes: “Thank you for your letter and request for information as part of the year 1936 cohort of physiologists. “I am still active in research at the University of Sydney and, together with a small group, we are examining the physiology and genetics of the human P2X7 receptor in immune and hemopoietic cells. “My interest in P2X7 began at the University of Pennsylvania in 1986, when George Dubyak introduced me to this extraordinary receptor. P2X7 is ancient in an evolutionary sense and is activated by extracellular ATP to open a channel which dilates over many seconds to form a maxi-pore. Activation is P2X7 is the basis by which ATP ‘permeabilizes’ cells long known to some physiologists since the work of Harold Hempling (South Carolina) and John Parker (Chapel Hill). “I also maintain some clinical practice which gives me access to a wide range of polymorphic variants of P2X7 with either loss or gain of function. I urge my younger colleagues to follow their curiosity and be prepared to change their field of research, something not always encouraged by granting bodies. “I am looking forward to retirement when I will continue to work as an Emeritus Professor in a new field of neuroscience.” Letters to Beverly Bishop Clara M. Szego writes: “First thank you and the Senior Physiologists Committee that you represent for the thoughtful birthday greetings. What a reminder of my long and valued membership in our Society, and also, that it is later than we think! “As to the query on my present activities: I have indeed been continuing to a certain extent in writing and in scientific consulting with colleagues who have been vigorously extending the field that my laboratory helped to establish. Primarily, it has been very exciting to see that the conventional wisdom on mechanisms of steroid hormone action, which had been focused exclusively upon late genic activities, has now broadened to encompass the integrated view that the all-important initial recognition of the agonist occurs at the surface of those cells equipped with specific receptors at the outer cell membrane; and that communication of this event toward and into the nuclear compartment occurs through the intervention of a chain of poised, transducing intracellular components. Thus, if I were to have the temerity, in compliance with your suggestion to offer ‘words of wisdom’ for younger colleagues, it would simply be that all confirmed observations on a phenomenon must be incorporated into a concept of function, even if some of which are considered ‘inconvenient to strongly entrenched views. “In further response to your request for update on my activities, I confess that under the pseudonym of Marian Steele, I have enjoyed a lifetime of writing poetry. Some of my work has, occasionally, appeared in quality small-presses and anthologies. In addition, I lay claim to growing the area’s biggest and juiciest tomatoes in our outdoor raised beds. Accordingly, in keeping with the aphorism coined by my husband, Professor Sidney Roberts, I am a firm believer in the ‘mind over mattress’ mode of behavior.” John Cotes writes: “This is a belated ‘Thank you’ for your good wishes on the occasion of my 80th birthday in February 2004! To be replying 30 months later is evidence for your letter being appreciated, though I had intended replying sooner. “At the time I was fully involved in a re-write of my book Lung function, physiology, measurement and application in medicine. It was for a sixth edition which came out this year (2006) on my birthday. Publication was later than planned, but at a weight of five pounds (2.2 kg) represented a lot of book! The increase in weight compared with the first edition in 1965 was linear on calendar year, with a regression coefficient of 32.5 g per year. The increase matched the growth of the literature but clearly could not be sustained. However, any future edition is unlikely to be my problem. “I am now back into research and, with my retired colleague Dr. Jim Reed, recently communicated to Physoc a new two compartment model of exercise ventilation in healthy men (1). The two compartments (alveolar ventilation and ventilation of the airway deadspace) seem obvious now that they have been formulated, so it surprises me that up ‘til now we lung physiologists have been content to attribute variations in minute ventilation between individuals to uneven lung function, without attempting to quantify the considerable contribution of pattern of breathing. The omission might be considered a tribute to Dr. John West whose elegant model of distribution of ventilation-perfusion ratios (2) continues to dominate thinking on this subject. Jim’s and my new model, like John West’s, has great clinical relevance. “Before the year is out, I expect to have given five communications on pattern of breathing to learned societies in UK and Europe, something that would have been inconceivable had my wife not been a practicing physician with numerous outside interests. Thus, I am keeping my end up!” Cotes, JE; Reed, JW. Proc Physiol Soc 2006:3-C39. West, JB. Respir Physiol 1969; 7:88-110. Letter to Martin Frank Felix Bronner writes: “This Senior Physiologist has been asked to pass on some news to our younger members. With my 92nd birthday safely behind me, I send them some that dates back to the years before I became a member myself. “A Bit of History: It can fairly be said that modern electrophysiology originated in the 1930s at the Harvard Medical School laboratory run by Alexander Forbes and Hallowell Davis. Forbes had started things ten years earlier while a naval officer in World War I (1914-17) where he encountered the newly discovered vacuum tube. By 1920 he had wired together what was probably the world’s first physiological amplifier and used it to deliver amplified nerve action currents to his string galvanometer recording device. His report, in 1920, runs 62 pages in Amer. J. Physiol., vol. 52. Apparently editors were much more lenient with their precious published pages in those days. “During the 1920s, Forbes and Davis used successively improved amplifiers for their studies on nerve impulses, and when I entered the lab in 1937 its engineer, Albert Grass, had just completed the first recognizably modern versions of the two devices essential for animal and human electrophysiological research: a multi-channel ink–writing clinical EEG recorder, and the first version of an integrated laboratory system consisting of a stimulus generator, a physiological amplifier, and an oscilloscope with a 32 mm moving picture camera mounted in front of it to record the physiological responses. Both of these instruments were the first stable prototypes of the research and clinical devices used today. “Sometime during the 1933-34 winter the first EEG alpha rhythms seen outside of Europe were displayed on the oscilloscope that had finally replaced the laboratory string galvanometer. The EEG came off Davis’s scalp, recorded by two of his graduate students, H. N. Simpson and A. J. Derbyshire. “A few years later Professor Davis—he was the elected President of our Society in 1958—-brought a patient with epilepsy to the lab and invited several Boston physicians to see what was probably the first clinical demonstration of an ink–writing EEG machine. When the patient repeatedly produced the dramatic ‘spike–dome’ abnormality characteristic of that disorder, the future of the EEG as a neurological diagnostic tool was assured. “The 1930 decade at the Forbes/Davis lab yielded three more noteworthy events. “The Davises, Hallowell and wife Pauline, reported the first auditory, visual, and somesthetic evoked responses recorded from the scalps of sleeping and waking human subjects. I was one of them, and remember how difficult it is to fall asleep during an experiment when doing so is the whole point. “Davis recorded cochlear potentials from animals, confirming the Weaver/Bray 1930 demonstration of the electrical response of the cochlea and initiating his lifetime of contributions to hearing research. “For the first time ever, Birdsey Renshaw used microelectrodes to record from single brain cells (his hippocampus paper was published in 1940) and, with Davis, I used microelectrodes to record spontaneous and stimulus-driven single cochlear nucleus cell responses from the cat. “A unique feature of that 1930 decade was the sudden confluence—in Boston and elsewhere—of so many new phenomena to be studied—Berger’s brain waves, cortical evoked potentials, cochlear potentials, single brain cell responses—with so many powerful new tools for doing the job—microelectrodes, stable stimulators, reliable amplifiers, and permanent recordings from cathode ray oscilloscopes and ink-writing oscillographs. Surely there has never been a more propitious time to begin a career in neurophysiology than that 1930 decade, and it was my very good fortune to begin my brain research career at that right place at that right time." |
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