Biographical Memoirs Volume 46 (1975) / Chapter Skim
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10. Cyril Norman Hugh Long
10. Cyril Norman Hugh Long
Pages 264-309
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From page 265... ...
D HARDY CYRIL NORMAN HUGH LONG, the elder son of John Edward and Rose Fanny (Langdill)
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Long was fond of describing to his American grandsons the Wigan Grammar School, where he and his brother Reggie began their studies, as a strict oldfashioned British boys' school. It was then directed by a Reverend Chambres, a scholar himself, who had the gift of interesting others in learning.
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From page 267... ...
Like most boys, he also loved such robust activities as "tenting," hiking, or bicycle tours. Wet days found him building models or in the library reading—Jules Verne or historical novels, for he was naturally too precise to enjoy literature as an art.
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On completion of grammar school he enrolled immediately in the Honours School of Chemistry at nearby Manchester University. His choice, according to a description hv ~ F Falcon we ~ ~ 1 ~ ·, ~ ~ ~ -- rig ~ Jo -I a school wltn a long and alstlngulshed record, especially in the training of men.
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From page 269... ...
He told me that he was working on the physical and chemical changes underlying muscular contraction, and that the latter was associated with the breakdown of glycogen to lactic acid. He needed the assistance of a chemist to follow these changes both in animals and in the blood of humans who were exercising.
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From page 270... ...
I was at that time an enthusiastic player of football, field hockey, and cricket and this interest was soon put to practical uses by my superiors for I found myself running up and down stairs, or round the professor's garden while at intervals healthy samples of blood were withdrawn from my arms. When I had recovered from my exertions I was asked to sit down and analyze these for lactic acid." Professor Hill's story is a little different and gives Long credit for more initiative: "Long came and joined me in 1922 in Manchester.
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Fletcher (who had been Hill's tutor at Cambridge) , describing the production of lactic acid from glycogen during contraction of the isolated frog muscle, must have excited his curiosity, especially since he was already interested in the chemistry of carbohydrates.
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Under Fletcher's supervision Hill had worked in an odoriferous, unglamorous cellar side by side with Lucas and others, for the physiology labora~ory at ~amor~c~ge In those days was crowded with many "giants per square foot." Thus it is not surprising to find Long assimilating some progressive ideas about science and education. Always a staunch adversary of Victorian utilitarianism, he quoted Sir Edward Appleton in 1955 - "Knowledge and insight are sufficient reward in themselves"—to express a view that has not c~Joye(1 universal popularity as the century progressed.
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From page 273... ...
Interestingly enough, a letter from Lupton from the nursing home suggests that some of their techniques for studying exercise in man be applied to diabetic patients. It is not unlikely that Long was himself already thinking about the subject that was ever after on his mind: the syndrome of diabetes and how the various endocrine glands play upon metabolism during its development.
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From page 274... ...
degree, in 1928, he took charge of the medical laboratory at the Royal Victoria Hospital for the Department of Medicine, becoming assistant professor of medical research at McGill in 1929. Writing of the talented and kindly Meakins in an obituary in 1959 he said, "My acceptance of this opportunity was perhaps the most fortunate decision I have made in my scientific career." While it would have been easy for Long to enjoy moderate fame (a contemporary newspaper article refers to him as a "noted physiologist")
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From page 275... ...
Indeed, his laboratory notebook was hardly interrupted by its trip across the Atlantic. While the publications of the next seven years covered a variety of topics as Long gained knowledge of medicine and collaborated with others on the staff, it is interesting to note that throughout he was still preoccupied with the fate of lactic acid in health and disease and the neuroendocrine control of carbohydrate metabolism.
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From page 276... ...
He gained some reputation for youthful gaiety among his fellow medical students, although one can hardly imagine his having much time for such things considering the burden of work he carried at the time. He was changing, too, becoming more teacher than student, more leader than follower, and guiding his first graduate students.
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From page 277... ...
It was with some annoyance that he received a typical reply from Lusk in which this hero casually discounted Long's meticulous results as due to a leaky apparatus! Nevertheless he had gained enough confidence in his own accomplishments to present a paper to Manchester University for a D.Sc., which was bestowed on him in 1932, shortly before he left McGill.
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From page 278... ...
Although Long came from a school that upheld the pancreatic origin of diabetes, he immediately appreciated the importance of the discovery a few years before by Bernardo Houssay that the removal of the pituitary gland produced a remarkable amelioration of experimental diabetes, clearly demonstrating the participation of at least one extrapancreatic factor in the diabetic syndrome. Thinking of the task ahead, Long and Lukens remembered the clinical observation that diminished function of the cortical portion of the adrenal gland lowers the blood sugar.
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From page 279... ...
that indeed the lessening after adrenalectomy of the copious amounts of sugar in the body so typical of diabetes might best be attributed after all to a reduction in sugar production from other sources, notably body protein. These conclusions have since been confirmed many times, not only in Long's own laboratory, as more highly purified hormones became available, but also, as the years have passed, by the work of others throughout the world.
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From page 280... ...
Long gave substance to the concept that the "balance of the endocrine glands" was related to the "diseases of metabolism." In 1936 he proposed to the American College of Physicians that "the clinical condition that follows hypo- or hyperfunction of an endocrine organ is not merely due to the loss or plethora of that particular internal secretion but is a result of the disturbance of the normal hormonal equilibrium of the body"—still, almost forty years later perhaps the most important single idea in endocrine research. The rooms of the new institute in Philadelphia were well filled now.
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From page 281... ...
. Longs remained at Yale until his retirement thirty-three years later, first as professor and chairman of the Department of Physiological Chemistry, receiving the appointment as Sterling Professor in 1938.
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Admittedly, the champions of such freedom were to suffer mounting frustrations in the mid-century United States as the young scientist became more and more lost in vast impersonal projects, often entirely taken out of private hands by the government. Long found much to do at Yale in the thirties and forties and much to admire, chiefly those elements introduced previously under that dynamic innovator in medical education, Milton C
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From page 283... ...
Surprisingly, the sense of humor that animated his private conversations, often making him a genial host or welcome arrival at a dull party, almost never surfaced in his formal lectures. In this he was in marked contrast to some of his lively contemporaries at the school.
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From page 284... ...
He was proud of their high marks in National Board Examinations and celebrated their other achievements as much as he did those of junior members in his own departments. He took particular satisfaction in the large numbers of both groups of former students who became professors and department chairmen at other schools throughout the country, for he thought that the most important responsibility of the school to the community was to provide leadership in teaching and research.
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From page 285... ...
Similar plans are now being adopted by many medical schools throughout the country. Since the school had been on the brink of disaster, it is amazing to hear from Long's professor of surgery that the five years of his deanship were "thoroughly happy years professionally, perhaps in part because we were both new in our
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From page 286... ...
Shiny office machinery, on the other hand, had been selected from the latest models. One saw him over a very neat but undistinguished desk, hair prematurely white since the thirties above a rather long, thin face with sharp, closely set dark eyes and a slightly deviated nose, the result of his athletic past.
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From page 287... ...
The central theme of Long's research remained the endocrine control of metabolism, which is "far more complex than appeared possible a few years ago." On the basis of work carried out with Miss Fry, who had come with him from Philadelphia, and a medical student, B Katzin, he was able to describe quantitatively for the first time the biological properties of the adrenal cortical hormones, and a classic paper was published on this subject in Endocrinology in 1940.
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From page 288... ...
During World War II his group, under Franl: Engel, investigated the role of the catabolic effects of the adrenal cortex in hemorrhagic shock. Afterward the laboratory returned to diabetes and related topics, particularly obesity, and continued the search for the nature of the effects of the adrenal cortical hormones on intermediary metabolism.
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From page 289... ...
While primarily concerned with subjects relating to the endocrine glands, his involvement broadened as he became more experienced in the administration of medical research and education. Long had witnessed at close range the postwar surge of public interest in research in medicine, which was responsible in part, it must be admitted, for the success of laboratories like his own.
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Upon reaching the age of retirement, in 1969, he was appointed a fellow of the John B Pierce Foundation's Yaleaffiliated laboratory, where he continued his research in the endocrine control of metabolism as related to environmental physiology.
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," it seems highly unlikely that Long and Lukens would ever have fully appreciated the relationship of the endocrine glands to the biochemical changes of diabetes mellitus if they had not had wide experience in clinical medicine. Fourth, in Hugh Long's day there was more leisure for maturing, more time for contemplation and, finally, no one was ashamed, in the words of A
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From page 292... ...
Cox Medical Research Institute, and Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania 1942 Became an American citizen 1936-1970 Yale University: Chairman, Department of Physiologi cal Chemistry, 1936-1951; Professor of Physiological Chemistry, 1936-1938; Sterling Professor of Physiologi cal Chemistry, 1938-1951; Director of Graduate Stud ies, Department of Physiological Chemistry, 1937-1948; Chairman, Department of Pharmacology, 1939-1941, 1952-1953; Chairman, Division of Biological Sciences, 1939-1942; Fellow, Calhoun College, 1940-1970; Dean, School of Medicine, 1947-1952; Chairman, Department of Physiology, 1951-1964; Sterling Professor of Physiology, 1951-1969; Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Physiology, 1952-1961.
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Pierce Foundation 1970 Died July 6 Member American Diabetes Association, American Philosophical Society, American Physiological Society, American Society for Clinical Investigation, Argentine Society of Biology, Association of American Physicians, The~Biochemical Society (Great Britain) , British Diabetic Association, Connecticut Diabetes Association Inc., Connecticut State Medical Society, Endocrine Society, Fulton Society, Horseshoe Club (London)
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From page 294... ...
Med. 41, 95, 1968; Year Book of the American Philosophical Society, 1970, p.
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The removal of lactic acid during recovery from muscular exercise in man. Proceedings of the Physiological Society.
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Katz. A comparison of the lactic acid contents of the mammalian heart and skeletal muscle after stimulation and in rigor mortis.
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Oxygen consumption, oxygen debt and lactic acid in circulatory failure. Journal of Clinical Investigation, 4:273-93.
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Med., 32:743~5. Recent advances in carbohydrate metabolism with particular reference to diabetes mellitus.
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The effect of adrenalectomy and adrenal cortical hormones upon pancreatic diabetes in the rat.
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l., 32: 2242-56. The adrenal cortex and carbohydrate metabolism.
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The endocrine control of carbohydrate metabolism and its relation to diabetes in man. Proceedings of the American Diabetes Association, 2:99-115.
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Effect of high protein diets on size and activity of the adrenal cortex in the albino rat. Endocrinology, 32: 403-9.
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1946 Biochemical changes associated with the activity of the adrenal cortex. Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, 78:317-21.
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Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 23:260-82. The relation of cholesterol and ascorbic acid to the secretion of the adrenal cortex.
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Participation of adrenal cortex in alterations in carbohydrate metabolism produced by epinephrine.
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Dintzis. The effect of adrenal cortical hormones on the carbohydrate metabolism of the liver.
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(A) Recent observations on the role of the adrenal cortex in carbohydrate metabolism.
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BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS 1960 Characteristics of the adrenal ascorbic acid response to adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH)
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Effect of cortisol on the plasma amino nitrogen of eviscerated adrenalectomized-diabetic rats. Endocrinology, 80:561-66.
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