Homer Smith: his contribution to physiology.

F or three decades, from the mid1930s until his death in 1962, Homer Smith was the preeminent figure among those interested in the physiology of the kidney. His leadership reflected not only the seminal research contributions of Smith and his colleagues and the conceptual framework that he developed, but also the extraordinary lucidity that he brought to the exposition of work in renal physiology-both his own and that of others. Not least, however, was the large number of younger people whose careers were launched in his laboratory and who went on to become leading contributors to the field. Smith was appointed to the chairmanship of the Department of Physiology at New York University in 1928 (at the age of 33!), having already held the equivalent position at the University ofVirglnia for the previous 3 yr. Although before his appointment at N.Y.U. , Smith had carried out studies on the composition of body fluids in several classes of vertebrates, he had not undertaken work diredily related to the function ofthe kidney. He had, however, come close to kidney function when he did a study of nitrogen excretion in camels. It had been reported that the urine of the bactrian camel contained no urea or ammonia, an observation that surely required further investigation. The story (1) that Smith followed the camel of a visiting circus, pot in hand, to collect the urine is almost surely apocryphal. Smith was certainly not averse to the expenditure of considerable effort to get the appropriate material for this studies: for example, to Africa to collect lungfish and to Siam and Malaya to study freshwater elasmobranchs. In the case of the camels, however, the samples were collected for him by keepers at the New York Zoo. At least that is what Smith said in his article on the subject (2) and he was not likely to be hiding a rather unorthodox source of his material, because the study included not only the bactrian camel but the dromedary, llama, and alpaca as well, none of them likely to be found in a traveling circus. Of course, there was plenty of urea in the urine of all of them. The channeling of Smith’s efforts into renal physi-