Homer W. Smith Award lecture. The juxtaglomerular apparatus: from anatomical peculiarity to physiological relevance.

Homer Smith died in 1962, the year before I started my career in the Department of Physiology of the University of Goettingen. At that time, his original work was still well known and widely quoted. Several decades later, this has of course changed, and the newer generation of renal physiologists and nephrologists is often unaware of who Homer Smith was and what he did. This is not totally surprising given the time elapsed and the short half-life of scientific fame and the fact that the electronic library, which we more and more rely on exclusively, does not go back beyond 1965 or so. I would therefore like to begin my presentation by honoring the man who is commemorated by this award. Born in 1895 in Denver, he received an A.B. from the University of Denver in 1917. He joined the armed forces and was transferred to the Chemical Warfare Station in Washington D.C., where he studied the biologic effects of gases, specifically of mustard gas, under the supervision of E.K. Marshall, who later provided proof for tubular secretion of organic compounds and its saturable nature. After the end of the war, Homer Smith enrolled in graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University and received the D.Sc. degree in chemistry in 1921. His early scientific work revolved around the chemotherapeutic value of arsenic compounds and the chemistry of secondary valence. After 2 years in the laboratory of Walter Cannon at Harvard University (1923–1925), he turned to studies of marine biology and of the physiology of fish. Around 1930, he began to develop and apply quantitative methods to studying the function of the mammalian kidney. He was appointed chairman of the Department of Physiology of the University of Virginia at the age of 30 yr. In 1928, he became chairman of the Physiological Laboratories at New York University College of Medicine, a position that he held until 1961. In the late 1920s, when Homer Smith started his work on the kidney, renal physiology as a field was not particularly advanced; in fact, it was considerably underdeveloped. This is reflected, for example, in the following statements of Alfred Richards, one of the other greats of kidney physiology in that same time: The literature of investigation of the kidney, since Bowman, contains no great illuminating discoveries comparable to those which are so conspicuous in other fields. Many of the questions of kidney function which are now being actively debated by physiologists are practically identical with those which were subjects of controversy seventy-five years ago. . . . Is the Malpighian body with its contained glomerulus a filter or is it a “secretory” structure? Is the epithelium which composes the tubule walls capable of secreting substances from blood into lumen of tubule, or is its task that of permitting or enabling restoration to the blood of substances lost to it in passage through the glomerulus? (41).