REPORT OF ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON PHYSIOLOGY 



To the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Institution. 



Gentlemen : During the last thirty years the greatest advances 

 in our knowledge of disease have been made through bacteriology, 

 i. e. , through the study of the life history of microbes. But it has 

 now been shown that the microbes are injurious not by their simple 

 presence in the body, but through the chemical products of their 

 activity, and that antidotes for the disturbances thus produced are 

 to be found in chemical substances formed in the animal body as the 

 result of reactions set up in the tissues and fluids by the microbes or 

 their toxic products. The study of these products and their anti- 

 dotes must of course be prosecuted by the methods of physiological 

 chemistry, and it is, therefore, by the aid of this science that we may 

 expect the next great steps to be taken in the advancement of medi- 

 cal science. But in order that these steps may be firmly planted and 

 lead to an accurate knowledge of those disturbances of function 

 which constitute disease it is essential that the normal metabolism of 

 the body should be much more thoroughly understood. Here, too, 

 it is largely by means of physiological chemistry that advances must 

 be made, and it is thus evident that it is more largely for the chem- 

 ical than for the physical side of physiology that, in the immediate 

 future, special provision for cooperative work should be made. 



The most important problems of ph5'siological chemistrj^ are, per- 

 haps, those which are connected with nutrition, and there is little 

 doubt that the establishment of a well endowed laboratory, provided 

 with all the apparatus needed for the study of the nutritive phe- 

 nomena of the animal body, would in a few years lead to results of 

 the greatest importance for the welfare of humanity. Such a labo- 

 ratory would, however, have to be provided with certain forms of 

 physical apparatus, for the study of the physical phenomena con- 

 nected with nutrition should go hand in hand with that of the 

 chemical processes. 



A laboratory thus established and equipped would be something 

 quite different from any existing institution, for though certain lab- 

 oratories possess particular forms of apparatus adapted to researches 

 of this sort, there is no place where the student of nutrition (in the 

 broad sense of the word) can find under one roof all the special 



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