Pulmonary vascular function.

On August 1, 1974, I received a telegram: 200 years ago today Priestley discovered oxygen. Let's hear it for Priestley! signed, Leland Clark. Now I say, Twenty years ago this University discovered Comroe. Let's hear it for Comroe! If our candles have been burning at both ends since th~n, it was you, Julius, who struck flint on steel, fanned flame from the sparks, trimmed our wicks, and rarely used the snuffer. lighted candle is as good a symbol of research as of respiration. Research, like respiration, is a process. The lighted candle respires and we call it flame. body respires and we call it life. Neither flame nor life are substance, but process. flame is as different from the wick and wax as life a hormone (1). It is instructive to consider the difference between the things and thoughts of research. Piet Hein said, The thing that distinguishes thoughts from things is that thoughts are harder to think. Newton taught science to have faith in processes as well as substances-to compute, predict and depend upon an irrational attraction. Caught up in enlightenment, man began to regard himself as a part of nature, a subject for investigation. web of self knowledge, woven so slowly between process and substance, still weaves physiology, the process, and anatomy, the substance, into the whole cloth of clinical medicine. Man's interest in his own reaction to his environment constituted a further leap of the intellect. From substance to process to self-examination, and then full circle to the processes of interaction. When we begin life, our first breath of 0 2 dilates our pulmonary arterioles, by diffusing through their outer walls, despite the persisting