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  ReviewTransdisciplinary unifying implications of circadian findings in the 1950sFranz Halberg1 1Halberg Chronobiology Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA 2Institute of Pediatrics, Scientific Center for Children's Health, Academy of Medical Sciences, Moscow, Russia 3Department of Cardiology, Hospital #60, Moscow, Russia 4Tokyo Women's Medical University, Daini Hospital, Tokyo, Japan 5Tokyo Women Medical University, School of Medicine, Daini Hospital, Division of Neurocardiology and Chronoecology, Nishiogu 2-1-10, Arakawa-ku, Tokyo 116-856, Japan 6Department of Internal Medicine, University of Florence, Italy 7Clinic of Functional Diagnostics and Rehabilitation, St. Anna Faculty Hospital and Masaryk University of Brno, Pekaská 53, 656 91, Brno, Czech Republic
Journal of Circadian Rhythms 2003, 1:2doi:10.1186/1740-3391-1-2 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.JCircadianRhythms.com/content/1/1/2
© 2003 Halberg et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article's original URL. AbstractA few puzzles relating to a small fraction of my endeavors in the 1950s are summarized herein, with answers to a few questions of the Editor-in-Chief, to suggest that the rules of variability in time complement the rules of genetics as a biological variability in space. I advocate to replace truisms such as a relative constancy or homeostasis, that have served bioscience very well for very long. They were never intended, however, to lower a curtain of ignorance over everyday physiology. In raising these curtains, we unveil a range of dynamics, resolvable in the data collection and as-one-goes analysis by computers built into smaller and smaller devices, for a continued self-surveillance of the normal and for an individualized detection of the abnormal. The current medical art based on spotchecks interpreted by reference to a time-unqualified normal range can become a science of time series with tests relating to the individual in inferential statistical terms. This is already doable for the case of blood pressure, but eventually should become possible for many other variables interpreted today only based on the quicksand of clinical trials on groups. These ignore individual differences and hence the individual's needs. Chronomics (mapping time structures) with the major aim of quantifying normalcy by dynamic reference values for detecting earliest risk elevation, also yields the dividend of allowing molecular biology to focus on the normal as well as on the grossly abnormal. IntroductionThis is a response to an invitation by Dr. Roberto Refinetti, professor of psychology and author of a book on Circadian Physiology [1], to contribute to the first issue of his new open-access journal, also focusing on circadian rhythms. This invitation is very greatly appreciated, since Roberto's genealogy is that of a clock-watcher (honi soit qui mal y pense), yet he also offers in his book some inferential statistical routines that can serve for resolving features of time series that are not immediately apparent to the naked eye. I learned much from Roberto, who reorganized the paper so that I offered him co-authorship, which, to my regret, he declined. In our discussions thus far, we agreed, above all, on the need for unity and a start with a discussion based on data. To introduce material that can no longer be readily retrieved electronically, I have listed here a few puzzles from experience in the 1950s. It is hard, however, to single out any field to which circadians are not relevant, whether to scientists and other professionals, or even the proverbial person on the street. As a minimum, everyone should know about when to eat [2,3] and, if need be, when to treat [4-6], or rather one should try to prevent the need to treat. Prof. Refinetti's journal is welcome first of all because circadian rhythms are a most prominent and useful aspect of our everyday physiology and thus deserve a medium that can be retrieved free of charge by everybody interested worldwide. The challenge of this invitation also stems from the circumstance that like many fields coming of age, chronobiology (the topic of the mechanisms underlying biological diversity in time) is practiced by many investigators in different ways, by some, like the editor, with main focus on circadian physiology, and by still others with exclusive focus on timekeeping along the 24-hour and calendar-year scales. Prof. Refinetti asked me to prepare this article in response to six questions, each of which I address below. When possible, I provide illustrations and references, with the foregoing and following comments given in the first person, with scrutiny by co-authors again only insofar as possible. Of necessity, too often I rely only upon my 84-year-old (age-qualified) memory. When I am uncertain of exact or even approximate calendar dates, I describe circumstances that provide at least a bracket in time, such as first meetings with colleagues, for the first consideration of "circadian" or for the interpretation of free-running by others, also using a free-running oscillator as an analogy and then as a model for exploring the endogenous aspects of rhythms in the biosphere. What was your initial interest in the biomedical field?As a child I had none. In my earliest adolescence I wanted to become a poet (and recently indulged again in this pastime [7]). My father, to whom I owe more than I can express in words – an international attorney who would have preferred to be a physician himself – kindly urged me to take up medicine, which I did. I in turn urged my daughters to do the same, not by words but by example and deeds as a family affair [8-14]. I started in high school accompanying physician friends of my parents in their practice and helping out in hospitals during vacation, when not travelling. Thus, as an interested student, I was just in time, before I went to medical school, to learn first-hand that cases of pneumonia for which there was then no treatment as yet, lasted about a week, before recovery or death, or as it was put in antiquity, before the occurrence of the lysis or crisis. This was my first encounter with timing in disease, namely with the biological week, which was known to Hippocrates in Greece, to Galen who had settled in Rome, and to the Islamic physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna) in Persia. They all knew that many diseases lasted about 7 days, the very lesson that I would have missed about single stimulus-"induced", or rather -"manifested", circaseptan periodicity, had I not observed patients before the advent of sulfonamides and penicillin [15-19]. During medical school, I dabbled in endocrinology and infectious disease research, including a study in a Rockefeller Institute in Budapest and at an institute on Lake Balaton. While trying to help in the improvement of a vaccine for typhoid, I managed to catch a severe case of it myself, perhaps by not washing my hands thoroughly before playing tennis over the noon hour. Subsequently, with an interest in the adrenal cortex in post-World War II Innsbruck, I was a university assistant, who, i.a., lectured to students in physical education who skied or otherwise exercised during the daytime and came fatigued to evening classes (I was popular with them since after a sentence or two I turned out the lights, showed slides and allowed those so inclined to sleep). At meetings, I also learned, only in theory, about the importance of probability in close contacts with the physicist Arthur March, a friend of Erwin Schrödinger, and wrote briefly about "rather than" vs. "yes/no" [20]. But the major findings of that time in health care seemed to be fully deterministic. The discoveries first of sulfonamides and thereafter of penicillin attracted the attention of many, including myself [21]. My concern earned me a much appreciated invitation to work with Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, in the bacteriology department of St. Mary's Hospital in London. I did not accept this invitation since I preferred a fellowship at Harvard in endocrinology (my love in classical medicine), but gratefully kept the few packages of cigarettes Sir Alexander kindly offered when he visited Innsbruck. The successes of both sulfonamides and penicillin were splendid and changed the practice of health care insofar as certain infectious diseases were concerned. Seemingly no statistics were needed. We dealt with true wonder drugs, we believed then, if not now. (Concern arising from findings of bacterial resistance came later.) By the 1940s, patients who received these antibiotics recovered, say from pneumonia, or so it appears, irrespective of treatment time. The ~7-day interval between the onset of a certain disease and its end, one way or another, was soon forgotten. To keep abreast clinically while it also helped to augment my income, I further took care of a dermatology and venereal disease ward in a French-occupation army hospital, where two cases stimulated my interest in timing to the point of producing a publication [22]. Arthur March had taught me caution, so I did not generalize when, on the same day, I diagnosed gonorrhea, again without statistics, in two young soldiers and started their treatment with penicillin concurrently [22]. In talking to the soldiers, I learned that they had had sexual intercourse with the same prostitute a day apart. As the treatment continued, the one who had been exposed later was first to show a negative smear for the infectious agent. The result suggested that the time elapsed between the infection and start of treatment could be important. With only two cases to compare, there was no way to attach any probability to the interpretation that timing was important, as stated in print [22]. In Innsbruck, I also regularly took vaginal smears from prostitutes, stained by Erhard Haus, to follow changes in mucus described in a book by George Papanicolaou, another excursion into a cycle, but for whatever reason we could not find the reported changes. Mapping of changes with an about-monthly period had to wait [16]. The general adaptation syndromeAlready in Innsbruck, I had learned about theories concerning the adrenal glands' corticoids, secretions then and now believed to be triggered by the wear and tear of everyday life (stress). Originally corticoids were of interest in military medicine, as support for vigilance by pilots in combat. In a much broader context, a general adaptation syndrome, based on ubiquitous responses of the adrenal cortex to various stimulations, was looked upon as the mechanism of all chronic disease [23-29]. In a general way, many stimuli to which an organism is exposed were recognized to elicit an unspecific secretion of adrenal cortical hormones in an "alarm reaction" that continued during a stage of resistance until the gland was "exhausted". At that time, timing was not considered as a dimension to be specified for a given response tested, as for instance was dosing for any stimulus tested, even though physiologists like Pavlov had recorded the clock-hour of each step in their experiments, even without the application of a stimulus [30]. With Hans Selye, the proponent of stress studies, in the limelight urging an interest in the adrenal, zoologist Samuel H. Williams, a U.S. government talent scout, singled me out in Austria after World War II. With help from others, including Dr. Dr. Mr. Gustav Sauser (whose doctorates were in medicine and theology; "Mr." stands for Magister of Pharmacy), my department head, then dean and eventually rector in Innsbruck, I received a fellowship from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Williams got me round-trip passage on a liberty ship to New York, to join the group of endocrinologists led by Fuller Albright and Frederic C. Bartter at the Massachusetts General Hospital ("Mass General") in Boston. By the time I arrived in October 1948 in New York, however, Albright's deteriorating health would no longer permit him to accept any new fellows, and I was reassigned to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and Harvard Medical School, also in Boston (visiting Mass General every so often). New wonder drugsOnce cortisone injections, like a pharmaceutical Lourdes, restored the ability to walk to people who had been lame for years, adrenocortical hormones gained a very important clinical status and came into the limelight. It became highly desirable to identify corticoids in body fluids on the one hand and to find substances that acted like them on the other hand. For both aims, I was assigned the development of an external bioassay, a test to determine corticoids and related compounds with action similar to that of corticoid. At the time, corticoids were scarce. Hence, I implanted substances under the skin of mice and determined corticoid-like activity in blood and other body fluids collected from patients. The endpoint I was to use was the count of certain circulating white blood cells in mice, i.e., the number of cells called eosinophils because they stained with the acid dye eosin [31]. Eosinophil mouse cells could not be seen and hence could not be counted with the stain used to count the corresponding cells in humans. A method had to be developed to see these cells under a microscope in blood drawn with a pipette after I made a nick in the mouse's tail. Once these cells could be counted, which was a matter of changing the dilution factor used for staining human cells, I also found, as had many before me, that the counts varied greatly, and I had to solve many puzzles [32], Figs. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11, before an external, and as it turned out to be, also an internal bioassay was to succeed; but this would occur after I moved to Minnesota.
I had to move since I was urged to use my return ticket to Austria and my one-year fellowship at Harvard was not renewed: I could not confirm an epinephrine test of adrenocortical function published for clinical use in an era before direct hormone assays were developed. Theoretically, epinephrine was believed to stimulate the hypothalamus, which secreted a substance stimulating pituitary ACTH secretion, which latter hormone (in turn) resulted in corticosteroid secretion. If the adrenal cortex was absent or deficient for whatever reason, such as atrophy or tuberculosis, an epinephrine injection should fail to depress the eosinophil count, since the critical adrenocortical hormone was missing from the patient with Addison's disease as a presumably indispensable step. The test worked for a number of senior visiting fellows, but not in my adrenalectomized mice, even after removal of all visible ectopic adrenocortical tissue on both sides of the spinal cord, including further the removal of the scrotal fat of male or of the large ligaments of female mice. In my hands only (and within a year in the hands of others), epinephrine considerably depressed the blood eosinophil count even after removal of the adrenal glands and adrenal cortex-like tissue elsewhere in the body. This result, at variance with those of others on the Harvard team was the first confrontation in my research, but hardly the last. In parting, my chief told me that he admired my "sticking to my guns" (these are the precise words I remember him saying), but it seemed unlikely to him that studies by others up to that time had to be re-examined. The epinephrine test was reconsidered and eliminated within a year, thanks to work by others, but by then I was at the University of Minnesota. Maurice B. Visscher, then an opinion-leading physiologist (who had worked on a "law of the heart" with Ernest Starling, the coiner of "hormone") whom I had met while he was visiting Innsbruck, gave me an opportunity to continue work in his department there, which included a division of cancer biology headed by John J. Bittner (the discoverer of the first mammalian cancer virus). Thanks to John, plenty of inbred mice were available, which he had himself mated brother-to-sister for well over 20 successive generations. When John became George Chase Christian Professor of Cancer Biology at the University of Minnesota, he had the necessary staff and facilities to breed thousands of mice each week, shipped all over the world, and every so often I could use hundreds of mice that were left unshipped to others. The vast majority of the genes in each of these animals of a given inbred strain was assumed to be identical to those of its siblings. To my surprise, I found that when I handled the mice less, by using separate but comparable groups of inbred mice at different times each subjected to the "stress" of sampling but once, the cell count showed possibly even more variation than before. Now, however, the pattern of eosinophil variation was predictable. The average number of these particular white cells would drop from high counts in the morning to low counts in the evening, Figs. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. The count changed in one inbred strain, the C57 Black subline 1 (B1) from ~1,500 per cubic millimeter (mm3) of blood to less than 600, Fig. 9, and in another subline (B4) from ~700 ± 59 to much less (369 ± 42), and in still other strains from a few hundred cells per mm3 to less than 60 per mm3, Fig. 7. There was also a genetic difference, not only in mean count [33], but also in extent of change [34]. As I reduced the exposure to irregular stimuli bringing about variations, a regular underlying cycle was uncovered with its genetic aspects, Figs. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. The eosinophil cell count of mice varied in an about 24-hour (or circadian) cycle that depended upon genetic make-up [32,34], Figs. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11, just as did the varying traits (smooth/wrinkled seeds, purple/white flowers, tall/short stalks) of Mendel's pea plants in Brno. While I was in Boston, I formed a lifelong friendship with Fred Bartter, who became chief of the Hypertension-Endocrine Section and eventually director of the Clinical Center at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Our cooperation is documented in 36 published titles, listed in my bibliography on my website http://www.msi.umn.edu/~halberg/ webcite. Of course, neither the number of publications nor the fact that they include a Current Contents "Citation Classic" [35] counts, but only their content. The mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss went so far as to ask for "much" (multum) while explaining that he did not want "many things" (multum sed non multa). He may be right about "much", but too restrictive with "not many things". An inventory of joint publications constitutes at least a numerical approximation, albeit never an objective measure, of the intensity of motivation spent in cooperation. The reader can only be led to sources and is invited to judge whether, for a given endeavor, the Gaussian ideal of much is met. In circadian mapping as for a broader chronobiology, and certainly for the transdisciplinary chronomics, one can strive for "much", yet must also try to do so in each of many things (multum etmulta), and for many people once health care as well as mathematics is involved. The condition "for many" may be met if Fred Bartter's suggestion that "information by cosinor should become a routine" [36] comes true, if thereby early changes, e.g., in the circadian amplitude of diastolic blood pressure are picked up with objective inferential statistical methods and lead to efficient treatment for preventing strokes and other severe diseases: prehabilitation. Gauss' emphasis may then be changed to "much for many", the promise of chronomics. Many elevated risks in everyday physiology are silent to both the individual concerned and to current health care and hence awaiting chronomic surveillance for detection in as many people as possible. The prevention of a massive stroke can mean very much for the individual and for society that pays for the financial burden directly or by insurance premiums. The greatest promise of circadian systems is a better universal health care at less cost and, for science, much new information, Fig. 12. When a kind of time-unqualified, single-sample- "evidence"-based medicine (what a misnomer for an art) changes from spotchecks in trials for the masses to a universal continued, chronomically interpreted self-surveillance, chronomics will be the indispensable complement for genomics and vice versa, of course. In this context, the behavior of circadian systems will remain essential to detect alterations that are still reversible, a procedure for cardiovascular disease prevention as important as vaccination. Bartter [36], Levine [37] and I [38] might have overstated our case, but the story told with Henry Nash Smith is not new [39,40]. Without the evidence in Fig. 13,14,15,16,17, Theodore C. Janeway concluded a century ago [41]:
... it is essential that a record of the pressure be made at frequent intervals at some time previous [presumably to an examination], to establish the normal level and the extent of the periodic variations. When this is done, it may be possible to demonstrate changes of small extent, which, lacking this standard for comparison, would be considered within the limits of normal variation. Now we have the monitors with a 90% reduction in the cost of their acquisition for all comers interested in self-help who care to write to http://corne001@umn.edu webcite[42] and to acquire chronomic literacy. Attaining the goal of Janeway, Bartter and Levine is thereby greatly facilitated. But blood pressure literacy is just a step to universal chronobiological and chronomic literacy as the "hook" [39]. Right or wrong, the spirit of what we propose, is based on a parallel drawn from the history of universal "3-R" ("reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic") literacy in the USA to use education in chronomic self-help in health care [8,9], Fig. 12. As for science, Fig. 18 tries to tell the story by focus only upon the puzzles of the 1950s, with their implications for today and the future.
After Fred Bartter and I met again at NIH in Bethesda, Fred set an example by around-the-clock measurements of his blood pressure for the rest of his life [43] and staunchly advocated a chronobiologic (now chronomic) interpretation of the record. He wrote about a patient who received different blood pressure diagnoses from two different physicians, one seen in the morning, the other in the afternoon: By conventional standards, this patient is clearly normotensive every morning. But the blood pressure determined each day at 6 in the afternoon provides especially convincing evidence that this patient is a hypertensive. ... My plea today is that information contained in [data curves compiled under differing circumstances, such as 24 hours a day/7 days a week] become a routine minimal amount of information accepted for the description of a patient's blood pressure. The analysis of this information by cosinor should become a routine. It is essential that enough information be collected to allow objective characterization of a periodic phenomenon, to wit, an estimate of M [MESOR, a rhythm-adjusted mean] as given for the three statuses in this patient, an estimate of A [circadian amplitude] itself, and finally an estimate of acrophase. In this way, a patient can be compared with himself at another time, or under another treatment, and the patient can be compared with a normal or with another patient. [36] Also taking around-the-clock measurements was another MESOR (midline-estimating statistic of rhythm)-hypertensive friend, Howard Levine [37], professor of medicine at the University of Connecticut. I had met Howard in Wels, Upper Austria, when he was a captain in the medical corps of a U.S. Army field hospital and I was in charge of an improvised hospital treating mostly patients with typhus. Together, we published 41 titles. I visited him the day before he died: despite his weakness from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Howard still completed sets of various self-measurements, as did Fred until his stroke, from which he died within about 10 days, as I learned from Catherine Delea, his right-hand colleague and a chronobiologist herself [44]. The major physician-friend who influenced my career was the late Agostino Carandente, whose only problem as head of the Hoechst Foundation in Italy was that he was too big for a national job, as Charles de Gaulle was too big a personality for postwar France. Agostino was ahead of his time in realizing the need for chairs, courses, meetings, journals, WHO contacts and a special laboratory for what was to be developed as chronopharmacology, chronotoxicology and chronotherapy [4-6,45]. My introduction to chronobiology is dedicated to him [15]; and he had the satisfaction of seeing his (and "my") daughter Franca hold the world's first chair in chronobiology, in Milan. With Franca, we published 90 titles. Our work with an antibiotic that also has immunomodulating properties still awaits use in the clinic. Agostino was responsible for the first drug to have built into its name the timing of its administration: Dutimelan 8 15, i.e., 8 am and 3 pm. I owe my acquaintance with Agostino to "carissimo" Norberto Montalbetti, with whom Germaine Cornélissen and I coined the term "chronome". Norberto represented chronobiologic laboratory medicine nationally and internationally at WHO at its best. His premature death was a great setback for chronomics, eventually carried forward with major contributions by Terukazu Kawasaki and Kuniaki Otsuka in Japan. What led you to become involved in rhythms research?Necessity, not choice. First, I encountered great variability as an assistant in medicine at the Brigham, and again across the street at Harvard, where I had been given a laboratory to develop, as already noted, a bioassay based on the depression by corticoids of counts of circulating eosinophil cells. In Minnesota, where I had a chance to continue work on the same topic thereafter, I could not confirm my own results, Figs. 1,2,3,4, until I solved the puzzles of opposite results that are sooner or later the inescapable finding at different clock-hours or weeks apart, whenever one unknowingly compares a group of animals with phase-shifted, Fig. 4, or one with phase-drifting (Figure 19 (IA)) rhythms, on the one hand, with a group that has the usual light-dark synchronized rhythm on the other hand [32]. This confusing situation applies to all rhythmic variables, whatever the period involved. Coping with variability led me to differing rhythms in inbred strains of mice [34]. The timing of rhythms and remove-and-replace approaches led me to a built-in adrenocortical cycle in humans [46] as well as in mice [34], that in turn led to free-runs [15,47,48] and thence to the ubiquity and critical importance of temporal organization [49,50].
When and why did you create the term "circadian"?The first time I probably considered the term must have been when a dear friend (best man at my wedding), Henry Nash Smith, brought it up. In his time, Henry was rated by others as the foremost scholar in the field of American Studies; it must have been before 1951 when he left Minnesota for the English department at the University of California-Berkeley, where he eventually became head and editor of the Mark Twain Papers and literary executor of Twain's estate, and in 1969 served as national president of the Modern Language Association. Before he left, Henry polished the English on many of my early papers and would in fact have been a first, or at least a co-author on them had he allowed it. McKeen Cattell, the head of pharmacology at Cornell Medical School, was then editor of the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, where I submitted a paper with Henry's help [51]. Cattell knew me from when he had been a guest lecturer in Innsbruck, where I was an assistant to the dean, and had hosted me personally in New York after my arrival in the U.S. He accepted the paper on receipt, but it must have amused Henry greatly when Cattell added that I should consult someone conversant in English! By the 1950s [34], I had found several kinds of differences among inbred mouse strains in counts of circulating blood eosinophils, namely in daily averages, and in extent of change within a day (Figs. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11). I had thus also learned about several already-noted puzzles [32] by the use of rectal temperature as a marker rhythm and the finding of periods that were one of the major reasons prompting the "circa" in "circadian": after blinding, rectal temperature showed an about (circa) 24-hour periodicity in each mouse, all happening to differ from precisely 24 hours, all happening in my hands (in the mouse, not in the rat) to be shorter than 24 hours and with the periods varying further among some of the mice themselves, Fig. 19. Another friend, Earl E. Bakken [52], the developer of the first implantable pacemaker for long-term use (and founder of the Medtronic company) [53], brought up the analogy of a free-running vs. 24-h synchronized oscillator, a master engineer's view of "circadian" vs. "dian" (Figs. 20 and 21).
Relatively early, I had become a member and later, for several decades, chairman of the nomenclature committees of the International Society for the Study of Biological Rhythms (now the International Society for Chronobiology), as well as being for decades the society's president [54], even though I resisted that invitation, urged by Arthur Jores, for many years. While batting for the society, nomenclature, designs, methods of sampling and analysis and popularization, notably in schools [9,10,55] then became my long-term concerns, as was and remains the development of standardized units to arrive at the equivalent of a metric system for spatio-temporal diversity, for what could turn out to be the ensemble of chronomics complementing genomics and vice versa [56]. I also served on a glossary committee of the International Union of Physiological Sciences (presumably nominated by Nathaniel Kleitman). In Stockholm in 1955, I proposed "diel" and "dieloid" as terms intended to replace the ambiguous "diurnal", which was then confusingly used in health care to describe both the daylight hours (e.g., diurnal vs. nocturnal epilepsy or asthma) and the full 24-hour day. "Diel" was rejected with the argument, I believe it was from Frank A. Brown Jr, that its coiner from Harvard had not done meritorious work (I had only added "dieloid" to separate 24-hour synchronized from desynchronized rhythms). Eventually I reverted, for the same reason, to "circadian" and "dian" again [57], again with the intent to separate environmentally synchronized from free-running rhythms. At the time other committee members rightly objected to the use of two terms, which would create confusion since one would have had to document free-running by lengthy circadian studies before using the term, and not everybody could be persuaded to free-run in caves or in the laboratory before the proper term could be applied to one's rhythm, an overwhelming argument. References to the nomenclature of the time are discussed in reviews [35,57] and nomenclature used by us is defined in a glossary [58], and in encyclopedias of time [59], statistics [60], aging [61] and shift-work [62]. What were your major contributions to the study of circadian rhythms?Whatever I tried to do rests on the discovery of hormones and many other contributions to the current invaluable body of physiological information. Otherwise, there would be no circadians and no chronobiology. We should all be particularly indebted to those who founded the study of life and health, whether by endocrinology and metabolism, the brain or a micro-organism [63,64]. These and earlier pioneers, up to and including me, as the endocrinologist with the "cosinor beast", as Jürgen Aschoff put it, are listed in a pictorial background to the field by Aschoff himself [65]. I am indebted to him for this genealogy, leading up to my contribution in the also-pictorial Capri [66-68] and elsewhere [69,70], and to Agostino Carandente for the settings he provided for courses that invariably led to many discussions Aschoff, Pittendrigh and Reinberg were invariably on top of my list of lecturers, even if Colin declined so of ten that eventually we had our meetings in Italy, bar one, without him. Another bit of history is written in the context of a gallery of chronobiologists, which I began with Earl E. Bakken, the developer of the chronotherapeutic device par excellence, the cardiac pacemaker [52,53]. When asked to write such a gallery, which I plan to do should I live long enough to continue it, I wish to submit it to those concerned, a task which is no longer possible with the scholars selected by the editor, to my very sincere regret. The gallery started with Earl Bakken, also apart from the cardiac pacemaker, since for well over 50 years Earl has kept tabs on what we are doing and reviewed the evidence underlying an approach to diseases of civilization, my most urgent task [52]. I appreciate his help and that of others who kindly wrote succinctly [71], giving me a new forum to report on what we are doing. Some of the past is recorded by my wife Erna [72] and, in more detail, by my most appreciated co-worker and teacher Germaine Cornélissen [73] who has become the leader in what has developed into chronomics. Germaine's is perhaps the most extensive spelling out of what I tried to contribute, matched by biographical detail and comments by John Pauly and Lawrence Scheving [54]. What they all fail to mention is that others very often carried the lion's share, as did the innumerable past co-authors and current participants in the large-scale studies, replicated in the 1950s on the cell cycle and now in BIOCOS [56], with focus on the cosmos. With my first wife Erna, I shared 333 publications, and so far I have 95 titles with my second wife Othild. I probably did more venipunctures on myself around the clock than most others; carried, with Erna, more rectal probes than others for years at a time (except for unavoidable removals) and had cuffs on my arm for years, second only to Erna and now to cardiologist Yoshihiko Watanabe. I also did more eosinophil counts on humans, mice, rats, monkeys, dogs and other species than most others in the past or present. Erna and others filled the counting chambers, e.g., during a full week when I bent sleeplessly over a microscope. (I had forgotten this until Dr. Dennis Lofstrom, while visiting, kindly reminded several of us, adding that I played tennis in between. Figuratively as well as literally, I tried to return every ball, and was University of Minnesota faculty champion in singles while playing figurative doubles with Erna and very many others who came to work with us.) During that sleepless week, Erna noticed, fortunately early, that we had counting chambers with two different depths, a non-periodic (purely artifactual) reason for a large variability; of course the more one focused on biological variability in its own right, the more the control of technical variability becomes essential, and vice versa. As on many other occasions, Erna's perspicacity saved the product of that week. In another case in Japan, her charm and down-to-earth personality mediated the successful implementation of an ambitious mapping of over two dozen clinical chemical variables on two continents. My daughters Francine and Julia pulled their oar in 120 or 56 published titles, respectively. Both Francine and Julia had experience with several daily temperature and other psychophysiological self-measurements, Francine over 6 pertinent years, Julia over 4 years; they demonstrated among many other findings, very different individualized changes in relation to menarche [74,75]. As a family we traveled a great deal, always with research as our aim: often to Italy where Erna planned and then cared for a laboratory in L'Aquila; repeatedly all over India for the Smithsonian Institution; and repeatedly to Japan. In Chandigarh, India, Francine (then a high school student, now a radiation oncologist), Erna and I had an opportunity to plan a study with B.D. Gupta, implemented by Akhil Deka, using the peak in serial temperatures of accessible oral tumors as a marker for timing treatment. Thus, a first marker rhythm-guided tumor chronoradiotherapy doubled the 2-year disease-free survival rate of patients with advanced perioral cancers, Fig. 13[11,14]. The promise of chronochemotherapy is shown in Fig. 14[6]. My daughter Julia, now a physician specializing in occupational medicine with an MS in public health, also worked on a master's thesis in biology [12] with Phil Regal, the ecological chronobiologist at the University of Minnesota, another dear friend. Joined by her mother Erna, Julia measured the blood pressure of groups of ~40 spontaneously hypertensive stroke-prone Okamoto rats in 24-hour profiles repeated at intervals of months over the lifetimes of these animals. Since it took about 4 hours by tail sphygmomanometry after immobilization and heating under a gooseneck lamp to complete a measurement series on 40 rats, they were sleepless for 24 hours. They detected circadian hyper-amplitude-tension occurring transiently before an increase in the MESOR (chronome-adjusted mean), i.e., before MESOR-hypertension in the laboratory, as subsequently shown in humans by Yuji Kumagai [76], who also taught self-measurements to his two daughters Eureka and (no longer so "little") Erna, the latter the namesake of my late first wife (see 1, 2), 3). From there several steps led toward using the circadian amplitude of blood pressure as a risk marker in cooperation with Paolo Scarpelli, who introduced chronobiologically interpreted self-measurements into his routine clinical endeavors in Florence, Italy, with Max Halhuber in Germany and Japanese friends Teruo Omae, Terukazu Kawasaki and Keiko Uezono; Kohji Tamura and Yoshihiko Watanabe (see 1, 2, 3). Kuniaki Otsuka, more than most, contributed critical data demonstrating a disease risk syndrome of an over-threshold blood pressure variability, an under-threshold heart rate variability, and an excessive pulse pressure as a group phenomenon, Figs. 15 and 16. Kuniaki extended his original research on a city-wide basis to individuals each monitored for a week up front (see 1). From a clinical viewpoint, he started to meet the greatest challenge today: stroke prevention by 24-h/7-day blood pressure and heart rate monitoring for detection of changes in variability [8,38,77-80] and their treatment, Fig. 17[38,80-82]. He has now also started a similar city-wide project in a second location. Concomitantly, another 24-h/7-day monitoring endeavor at St. Anna Hospital in Brno, Czech Republic (Mendel's home city), is being carried out by Pavel Homolka under the initiative of Jarmila Siegelova, Professor and Head of the Department of Functional Diagnostics and Rehabilitation at Masaryk University in Brno, and Bohumil Fiser, Head of the Institute of Physiology at Masaryk University and former Czech minister of health, now associated with WHO. Far beyond my personal family, I have been fortunate to have a broad international academic family. In this family, many members became independent, which is natural; others cooperated lifelong, and of course have my special recognition in a personal context [15,52,83,85,136]. A major lesson I learned is the merit of the inseparable activities in science and self-help in health care that can be an academic family affair today and perhaps a civic duty tomorrow [8]. Along with many other investigators, I started cartography in the mouse, Fig. 22; humans, Fig. 23[84,85]; and other species; we documented the amenability of circadians to phase-shifting at various levels of organization by manipulating lighting [86,87] and/or feeding in humans as in rodents [2,88]. In systematic studies, we learned about differences between advances of a circadian rhythm (which are usually slower than delays) and about polarity in such a way that in the same organism, some rhythms advanced while others delayed. In the laboratory, we were able to phase-shift a circadian rhythm in mitoses by studying the rodents for a sufficiently long time span and thus debunked the earlier view by others that mitotic rhythms cannot be phase-shifted [89]. Again at the cellular level, we phase-shifted circadians in RNA and DNA formation, in serum corticosterone and in susceptibility to audiogenic seizures. Different rates of phase-shifting [90] were found for liver glycogen in the first vs. the next 4 days following an abrupt change in lighting regimen and the rules of phase-shifting were mapped for circadians and only explored thus far for the much more slowly adjusting circaseptans that may be phase-shifted by 180° (after a transmeridian round-trip flight over 7 or more time zones). A transequatorial phase-shift of a circannual rhythm in the pre-trans-year era studied with the Marques family [314] awaits extension by a consideration of an even broader spectrum of intermodulating multifrequency rhythms.
A number of lifetime studies simulated shift-work on laboratory animals and a few studies of nearly yearly intercontinental flights complement circaseptan aspects of schedule shifts on insects with Dora K. Hayes and on Acetabularia with Hans-Georg Schweiger. These establish circaseptan aspects of circadian phase-shifting beyond a reasonable doubt, as does follow-up investigation by Mirian Marques, albeit the underlying mechanisms remain an unsolved, important puzzle. As many others did, we also studied circadians on mice kept in continuous darkness or continuous light, resulting, among others, in the persistence of a cell cycle, including rhythms in RNA and DNA formation [91]. The most impressive finding was that as a function superficially of clock-hour, the same physical stimulus, such as noise or whole-body irradiation or a drug, such as ouabain or many anticancer agents, or another chemical, or a bacteriological agent, such as alcohol or an endotoxin, respectively, would all have predictably (insofar as they are rhythmically) changing effects, as drastically different as survival vs. death, albeit only on a statistically (but not individually) highly significant basis. An individual dies just once, of course, but the point I am making is that we were dealing with differences in percent survival as a function of timing rather than with all or none responses. The context of these findings is described in puzzles, if not as paranoias, which is exactly what some were called at the time. Additional file 1. Table 1 - Summary of studies of Circaclian Hyper-Amplitude-Tension (CHAT) and Decreased Heart Rate Variability (DHRV) Format: DOC Size: 86KB Download file This file can be viewed with: Microsoft Word Viewer Additional file 2. Table 2 - Outcomes of Chronological screens of blood pressure and heart rate Format: DOC Size: 41KB Download file This file can be viewed with: Microsoft Word Viewer Additional file 3. Table 3 - Examples of self-surveillance chronobiological efforts Format: DOC Size: 54KB Download file This file can be viewed with: Microsoft Word Viewer How does your work relate to that of other pioneers in the field?My clinical work followed in the footsteps of Arthur Jores, who was for long the president of the International Society for the Study of Biological Rhythms as well as of the German Society for Internal Medicine and that for Endocrinology. I grew up with his textbook [92] and one by Henri Simonnet, who hosted me in Paris as a young man and led me to the pineal and, indirectly, to pineal feedsidewards, demonstrated by the indefatigable experimenter Salvador Sanchez de la Peña (Fig. 19). Jores fought what he called the "idiocy [Stumpfsinn] of 'three times a day'" [93], and wrote a critical review of the field in the 1930s [94] and hardly left a problem in chronomedicine untouched [93-114]. Werner Menzel, Jores' associate in chronomedicine, both in Hamburg, initiated curve-fitting, albeit without inferential statistical considerations, introduced a pump for clinical drug administration according to a preset schedule, and wrote a book on rhythms and shift-work, a source to the early literature [115], along with a book by Arne Sollberger [116]. These sources complement other books and the proceedings of other meetings [117-127]. In the perspective of the past half-century, I owe a great deal to Alexander Chizhevsky [128-132], whom I never met, whose hard data on a circadecadal rhythm in the incidence of cholera documented what he and Frank A. Brown Jr. independently called pervasive effects [133], albeit without inferential statistical time series analyses. In relation to sleep and other problems, Nathaniel Kleitman [134] was always supportive. He had monitored the physiology of his family, but unfortunately many of these records were lost. His daughter Esther Kleitman, however, provided us with self-measurements for many years, in which, among others, the new trans-year of human heart rate would be demonstrated. When Nathaniel turned 100 years of age, he offered to have his blood pressure and heart rate monitored for 24 hours. I felt that it was more important for his health to monitor for 7 days. He refused, and I lost out. I had re-used Kleitman's term "synchronizer", which was defined in the same way as Aschoff's subsequently defined Zeitgeber. Since both Aschoff and Pittendrigh had really spread, not only the word but also the concept of a self-sustaining oscillator much more than I would have done alone, it would have been only fair on my side to reciprocate. But all three of us redefined our terms, they a zeitgeber and I a synchronizer (as primary or secondary), respectively, as an external agent, usually a cycle that does not "give" time and merely synchronizes existing body time with its own (e.g., 12-hourly alternating light and darkness) schedule [48]. In discussing this view, I indeed referred to Aschoff's original demonstration and interpretation that "changes in length of cycle have been observed for the rhythm in bodily activities of rodents, kept in continuous darkness", i.e., that body time was rhythmic ("given") in the absence of a zeitgeber [48]. But he, like I, defined what could be called a Uhrzeit (clock-time) or Kalendarzeit (calendar-time) giver, whereas the internal time structure was given in the absence of the synchronizer. The use in chronobiology of "synchronizer" preceded that of the less ambiguous "entraining agent", a good synonym for "synchronizer". But why should we use two words instead of one, and in using "synchronizer", why not honor Nathaniel Kleitman? Brevity and ringing bells are the main criteria in coining terms. Investigators coming to our laboratory included both medical and graduate students and accomplished scientists who became collaborators and are highly valued co-authors, including Kenneth Berge, Anand P. Chaudhry, Halvor Vermund and Ed Flink in the early 1950s, and thereafter Bernhard Arbogast, Brian Brockway, Franca Carandente, Yoshihiko Chiba, Gabriel Fernandes, Leopoldo Garcia Alonso, Mauricio Garcia Sainz, Denis Gubin, Erhard Haus, Ramon Hermida, Yuji Kumagai, Helmut Künkel, Francis Levi, Cristina Maggioni, Mirian and Nelson Marques, Norberto Montalbetti, Ana Portela, Alain Reinberg, Salvador Sanchez de la Peña, Kalva Shankaraiah, Michael Smolensky, Brunetto Tarquini, Zhengrong Wang, Yoshihiko Watanabe, Wu Jinyi and Rina Zaslavskaya, to mention just a few. I regard them all as my teachers, among many others who cooperated, sometimes with teams of their own, such as Teruo Omae with Terukazu Kawasaki and Keiko Uezono; Kohji Tamura, and in particular Kuniaki Otsuka, who co-initiated BIOCOS and a series of meetings with original focus on chronoastrobiology. Institutionally, Italy's Hoechst Foundation in Milan and the University of Florence, under the leadership of Mario Cagnoni, were homes away from home. We have a long-term relation with Theodor Hellbrügge, who singlehandedly built social pediatrics in Munich, and who sent us a long series of advanced medical students who wrote their MD theses in Minnesota [135,136]. A lifelong personal friendship with Theo culminated in a recent symposium on chronomics in child development [137]. With respect to the editor's specific questions concerning Curt Richter, Jürgen Aschoff and Colin Pittendrigh, I emphasize that we were complementary, although Colin, according to Cambrosio and Keating [138], fought the idea of chronobiology as a science in its own right. For these influential opinion leaders, and for Frank A. Brown Jr, Erwin Bünning, Arthur Jores, Nathaniel Kleitman and Gregory Pincus among other distinguished scholars, rhythms then and now were mainly phenomena to be displayed in the time domain, preferably by typical examples (time-macroscopically), a very convincing yet selective approach, missing, more often than not, even one, or usually all inferential statistical estimates of characteristics of the period, amplitude, acrophase and waveform involved. For me in turn, the t-test sufficed in 1950 [34] and the analysis of variance until 1953 [139], yet by 1954, in the case of longitudinal series, the periodogram became desirable [47,140,141], temporarily replaced by some too-conservative power spectra [142,143], soon replaced by cosinors, as prior information accumulated concerning the reproducibility of rhythmic change in a given aspect of a circadian system [144,145]. Resolution in the frequency (or period) and phase domains became indispensable as an essential, albeit most of the time complementary time-microscopy, even when the computation of a periodogram in the desk-calculator era of the 1950s took a week to complete and another week to check. I had a lengthy conversation with Curt Richter only once, at a Cold Spring Harbor symposium in 1960, where he did not contribute a paper and did not accept as yet the proposition by most of us that there was a feature of endogenicity to circadians. I presented him with evidence about the extent of maintenance of an internal, albeit free-running structure, e.g., in time relations among rhythms in serum corticosterone and liver glycogen rhythms after blinding in mice and rest/activity, rectal temperature and urinary 17-hydroxycorticosteroid of humans in isolation from society, when the period synchronized is equated to 360°, Fig. 19 (ID) [15]. At that time, Richter had not yet discovered free-running in his rats. The rats I studied in continuous darkness had periods very close to 24 hours, in my hands usually 24.1–24.3 hours, lengthening with increased light intensity [146], in keeping with "Aschoff's rule" concerning rodents which Aschoff had earlier postulated and documented. After 1960, however, Curt Richter found free-running, as Colin Pittendrigh had earlier, and Aschoff before that [147]. It was my pleasure and privilege to fully support Richter's application for studies in chronobiology that I had to referee; he had made great scholarly contributions, already apart from chronobiology, again in our field, and he was a chronobiologist. Incidentally, I supported all applications by scholars in the field of rhythms, whether or not their views differed from mine. Once when I chaired a site visit to a chronobiologist in New York, the late Dorothy Kr |
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