David Miller

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.96.6a

The History & Archives Committee is instigating an online Physiology ‘Family Tree’. Many will be aware of such ‘trees’ hosted at www.academictree.org. Here one can see scientific ‘families’ as they have grown through generations of doctoral supervisors, collaborators and shared colleagues.

Such trees already exist for e.g. Anthropology, Philosophy, Physics, Chemistry, Evolutionary Biology, Developmental Biology, Cell Biology and Neuroscience. The last in particular already includes many of the founding fathers (and a few mothers) of our discipline.

At the recent Physiology 2014 meeting, nearly 100 members completed simple forms to help to provide the start for the Physiology tree. Together with the cross-connections from Neuroscience and other trees, this can soon grow into a large resource. Apart from simple human interest, such trees can help to reveal the ‘sociology’ of science: who worked with whom, when and where. This can throw new insights into how techniques and ideas – as well as the scientists themselves – first came together.

When the skeleton is ready to be made available online, we will announce it on The Society’s website. Then, as with the existing trees, the resource will be open-access, enabling anyone to edit, revise and enhance the information available. Fortunately, the software running academictree.org takes care of all the rest.

(For the curious, the images above are of: George Lindor Brown, John Stanley Gardiner, William Sharpey and Marthe Vogt.)