The following is the abstract of the article discussed in the subsequent letter:

Silverthorn DU. Restoring physiology to the undergraduate biology curriculum: a call to action. Adv Physiol Educ 27:91–96, 2003.—The National Research Council-sponsored report, BIO 2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists, describes a number of significant changes that should be made to the undergraduate biology curriculum if we are to adequately train students to become the researchers of the 21st century. What should be of concern to the physiology community is the lack of identifiable physiology in the proposed revisions. This article describes the report and suggests some steps that physiologists can take to enhance our discipline in the undergraduate biology curriculum.

To the Editor: I wholeheartedly agree with some of the points put forth by D. U. Silverthorn in her broadly-scoped essay “Restoring physiology to the undergraduate biology curriculum: a call to action.” Indeed, the omission of physiology as a core course from the proposed undergraduate biology curriculum was disappointing. However, I am not surprised that this occurred. Contrary to Silverthorn’s assertions, most undergraduate (and graduate) physiology courses do very little to promote a sophisticated level of quantitative thinking. I have firsthand experience with this, and I sought to fill this void by switching to chemical engineering for my doctoral studies, having completed undergraduate and Master’s biology-based degrees. Given this reality, I wonder whether the loss of identity of the field of physiology is in part due to some of its practitioners having misconceptions about what it really represents. A more honest evaluation of physiology as a discipline is required before it can be promoted.

An additional important factor contributing to physiology’s loss of visibility is that it has had to play catch-up to other disciplines, molecular biology in particular. The molecular biological and physical sciences have been the ones pushing the technological envelope and discovering novel biological regulatory mechanisms. It is these advances that get published in the most visible scientific journals. It seems to me that many physiologists have simply been using the knowledge and technologies developed in these scientific fields and applying them to their particular organism or system of interest. I believe that physiology may be able to enjoy resurgence only when fundamental scientific questions that pertain to the tissue, organ, or organism level become prominent once again. Examples include the emerging issues of organ heterogeneity and metabolic zonation as regulatory phenomena in and of themselves [e.g., see Wagner ( 1 )]. Analysis of such phenomena will require the development and judicious use of sophisticated biophysical analytical tools in concert with modeling approaches. Therefore, now is not the time for lamenting the ignoring of physiology and begging others (e.g., medical school committees) to require physiology courses. Rather, physiology faculty should heed the recommendations of the committee’s report to ensure that undergraduate biologists can at least appreciate the importance of such emerging problems and that budding physiologists are trained appropriately to solve them.