The good old days

When I was a medical student at the University ofCopenhagen in the 1960s the physiological worldseemed relatively simple. The general consensus wasthat physiology was the most fundamental subject in themedical course and that medicine was essentially appliedphysiology. Physiology was naturally taught by physiol-ogists, who worked in physiology departments and didphysiological research, the results of which were pub-lished in physiological journals. It was a stable well-defined system that had allowed enormous growth in ourknowledge of the normal bodily functions at all levels.Furthermore, it was a system that encouraged transfer ofphysiological knowledge into the clinical world, since allclinical students had a basic understanding of physiologyand a substantial number of the leading academic clini-cians had a background of actual research work in physi-ology departments.

The tough realities for physiologists today

Today, the picture is rather different. In many, but fortu-nately not all, universities, physiology departments nolonger exist. Mergers have occurred, with the result thatphysiology departments have been incorporated intolarge biomedical science departments. In many placesthe undergraduate medical course has also undergone aradical change and it is not only the style that has beenaltered dramatically. In reality many of the new medicaldoctors will have had no systematic physiology courseand those elements of physiology that have miraculously

survived the butchery seem distributed almost randomlythroughout the medical curriculum. In the UK we had anexcellent tradition of the best medical students intercalat-ing a “physiological year”, usually at the end of the pre-clinical course. In most of the places with “new” medicalcourses this does not happen any more, partly becausethe students essentially no longer have any feeling forwhat physiology is and partly because there is no naturalbreakpoint in the new courses. The influence of physiol-ogists within their own universities and specifically onthe education of medical students has therefore in manyplaces reached a low point.

Discrepancy between physiology’s achievement and current status

The apparent decline in the fortune of physiology depart-ments and the perhaps even more disastrous decline inthe prominence of physiology in the medical curriculumare in many ways quite surprising. These developmentshave coincided with an unprecedented increase in thepower of physiological techniques and the acquisition ofan enormously detailed knowledge of the regulation ofnormal bodily functions at the systems, cellular and sub-cellular level. Physiological journals, including our ownFEPS journal, Pflügers Archiv – European Journal ofPhysiology, are receiving an ever increasing number ofhigh quality papers and most physiological meetings areoversubscribed. The leading physiological review jour-nal (Physiological Reviews) has one of the highest Im-pact Factors, in spite of the fact that the ISI Impact Fac-tor system does not favour our discipline, because of thearbitrarily chosen short period of citation counting.Many physiological journals therefore have somewhatlower Impact Factors than comparable biochemical peri-odicals, but it is mostly forgotten that the physiologicaljournals have much longer citation half-lives. Purelyphysiological papers continue to be published promi-nently in the most respected general and molecular biol-ogy journals (for example, Science, Nature, Proceedings

O.H. Petersen is President-Elect of FEPS

O.H. Petersen (✉ )MRC Secretory Control Research Group,The Physiological Laboratory, University of Liverpool,PO Box 147, Liverpool L69 3BX, UKe-mail: o.h.petersen@liv.ac.ukTel.: +44-151-7945342, Fax: +44-151-7945323

Pflügers Arch - Eur J Physiol (2001) 441:725–727DOI 10.1007/s004240000477

F E P S O P I N I O N

O.H. Petersen

Physiologists, physiology departments and universities: discipline and interdisciplinarity

Published online: 16 December 2000© Springer-Verlag 2000

of the National Academy of Sciences of the United Statesof America, Cell and EMBO Journal), indicating the rel-evance of physiology for many other areas of biology. Atthe highest level of achievement, Nobel Prizes continueto be awarded to physiologists (for example, Neher,Sakmann, and Skou).

Physiology and functional genomics: discipline and interdisciplinarity

The discrepancy between the achievements of physiolo-gy and physiologists and their influence in their own uni-versities and on other research organizations is puzzling.Fashion has undoubtedly something to do with this. Thetruly enormous publicity given to the Human Genomeproject in recent years, and particularly to the announce-ment in June this year that the sequence of the humangenome was now (almost!) known, may well have giventhe general public, as well as many science administra-tors and funding bodies, the impression that all importantnew developments in biology are concentrated in thisarea. The quite amazing exaggerations in the generalpress have recently been wittily exposed by the promi-nent molecular biologist Sydney Brenner [1]. Unfortu-nately, it seems to me that many physiologists have alsobeen taken in by this monumental propaganda effort. I have on several occasions come across colleagues whoin semipublic circumstances claim that the completion ofthe human genome sequence has with one stroke totallychanged our outlook and created the need for a new dis-cipline, functional genomics. It is on some occasions im-plied that this new discipline may essentially replacephysiology, but, to me, functional genomics is simplyphysiology, as the function of gene products has formany years been the central occupation of very manyphysiologists.

I am of course not in any way suggesting that physiol-ogists should not be influenced by developments in “ad-jacent” areas of biology and indeed other sciences. I completely agree with Bernard Swynghedauw thatthere are indeed “golden opportunities” ahead [2]. Inter-disciplinary research is an extremely important part ofthe progress we are making. It has been my privilege,through work in several international organizations, totake part in many discussions on interdisciplinary re-search. One theme that always emerges from such dis-cussions is that good interdisciplinary research is totallydependent on the quality of the input from the individualdisciplines. Future progress in interdisciplinary researchis therefore very much dependent on the continuedstrength of our discipline, physiology. In my view this isbest achieved through strong physiology departments inour universities, strong physiological journals and strongphysiological societies including of course a strong andactive FEPS.

We should certainly engage ourselves in intensivecollaborations with, for example, molecular biologists,biochemists, immunologists and clinicians, whenever

this is profitable scientifically, but we should not fall intothe trap of thinking and acting as if physiologists whoare not personally engaged in doing molecular biologyhave “missed the boat” and are living in an ancient worldfar removed from the realities today. There has in factbeen enormous progress based on what we may callpurely physiological techniques. Recent developmentsin, for example, production of fluorescent bioactive mol-ecules as well as confocal and multiphoton microscopyhave allowed unprecedented and very direct observa-tions, at high temporal and spatial resolution, of thelocalization, translocation and activity of individual pro-teins inside the living cell. Indeed, biochemists are be-ginning to realize the enormous potential for high resolu-tion studies of the behaviour of individual molecules inspecific locations in intact cells [3]. My own group hasbeen involved in such work, in which it has been possi-ble to observe directly in normal living cells that onehormone can evoke simultaneously different patterns offluctuations in the concentration of the protein calmodu-lin in different subcellular locations [4].

Are big units necessary?

One of the arguments, that have driven the move towardsintegrating physiology departments into large biomedicalscience units, has been that in today’s world one has tobe big to survive. This is a model derived from compari-sons with the industrial world and it is not at all clearthat the analogy is appropriate. In fact, Academia Euro-paea (the European Academy of Science and Letters) inits comment to EU Commissioner Philippe Busquin’sproposals for a “European Research Area” stated clearlythat the concept of a “centre of excellence” should not betranslated into a “large research centre”. The Academynoted that many excellent centres, particularly in the LifeSciences, are quite small [5]. Future developments, mostprobably, do not favour the creation of large static multi-disciplinary centres housed on one site. A much more at-tractive and indeed flexible model is based on the “net-worked scientific community” [6] in which strong indi-vidual discipline-based departments collaborate world-wide with appropriate partners.

Physiologists should live in their own house, but collaborate extensively with other disciplines

In a university world driven by external demands, whereindividual academic disciplines have found themselvesincreasingly at risk, it is refreshing to be reminded of theproud statement made by Nietzsche: “I live in my ownhouse, have never copied anyone else…and at any mas-ter who cannot laugh at himself – I laugh”. This he saysis written “over the door to my house”. (Cited from anexcellent short article written by Richard Smith aboutthe present condition of our universities [7]). As physiol-ogists we can rightly be proud of our collective achieve-

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ments and, based on our own strong discipline, we havethe best opportunity to engage in meaningful interdisci-plinary collaborations and regain a strong influence onthe training of future medical doctors.

References

1. Brenner S (2000) False starts. Empty chateaux. Curr Biol10:R579

2. Swynghedauw B (2000) Are physiologists ready for the newphysiology? Pflügers Arch 440:333–335

3. Hunter T (2000) Signaling – 2000 and beyond. Cell 100:113–127

4. Craske M, Takeo T, Gerasimenko O, Vaillant C, Torok K,Petersen OH, Tepikin AV (1999) Hormone-induced secretoryand nuclear translocation of calmodulin: oscillations of calmod-ulin concentration with the nucleus as an integrator. Proc NatlAcad Sci USA 96:4426–4431

5. The Tree, Newsletter of Academia Europaea, Issue 15. August2000, p. 5

6. The European Commission’s ETAN Expert Working Group(1999) Transforming European science through information andcommunication technologies: challenges and opportunities ofthe digital age. Office for Official Publications of the EuropeanCommunities, Luxembourg

7. Smith R (2000) There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya.The Times Higher Education Supplement, August 18, p 17

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