A Brief History of the Society of General Physiologists Presented at the 50th Annual Meeting and Symposium of the Society

The Society of General Physiologists was founded in 1946. It started when a group of general physiologists at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, MA—H.A. Amberson (University of Maryland), S.C. Brooks (University of California at Berkeley), E.N. Harvey (Princeton University), M.H. Jacobs (University of Pennsylvania), R.S. Lillie (University of Chicago), A.K. Parpart (Princeton University), E. Ponder (Cold Spring Harbor), and L.V. Heilbrunn (University of Pennsylvania)—discussed the formation of a society as a spin-off of the American Physiological Society (APS). The Woods Hole group felt that the APS was too strongly dominated by medical physiologists, to the extent that general physiology suffered. A letter was sent to many physiologists to determine the level of interest in this new endeavor. The reply from Wallace Fenn (the secretary of APS) was typical. He thought that the APS was sufficiently flexible to allow for a...