| Popis: |
Physiologists are not accustomed to thinking of themselves as an endangered species, but perhaps we need to consider that possibility. Not long ago, a distinguished medical scientist asked me, "What's left in physiology today ifyou take away the neural and cellular parts?" When I finally grasped the assumptions behind his question, I was amazed, for he thought that all the other problems of physiology had been solved, that the physiology of organ systems and the integration of functions in living animals are completely understood. Physiology, he believed, had reached a static condition, like gross anatomy. Apart from a few minor details, the excitement was over. To a physiologist, this image clashes so sharply with reality that he wonders how it could arise. The answer, I suggest, is that scientists have become so specialized that we are in danger of forgetting the broad scope of biology. In seeking a full explanation, we must recall three developments in the years after the Second World War: advances in physiological knowledge stimulated by federal support of research, technical innovations that were in part the result of military needs, and the discoveries that created modern genetics and molecular biology. Some of the gains in physiology, particularly in the cardiovascular and respiratory fields, were widely recognized because they quickly found practical application in medicine and surgery. Others, like electrophysiology and the concept of cell "receptors," laid foundations that would become more and more important as time went on. Meanwhile, improvements in instrumentation altered virtually all of the life sciences, using the echoes of "sonar" to outline the internal structures of man, the X-ray diffraction of crystallographers to deduce the structure of complex biological molecules, and the digital computer |
