1957-2017: The Diamond Jubilee of Salt Glands: Knut Schmidt-Nielsen’s co-authors

In the last post I covered the history of the discovery of salt glands in birds by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen.  But who were his collaborators in the first salt-gland research, Carl Barker Jörgensen and Humio Osaki at the start, and then Ragnar Fänge?

Carl Christian Barker Jörgensen (1915-2007) was well known internationally as an animal physiologist but the only biography I have been able to find is in Danish. Therefore, Google Translate has had to come to my aid.. In 1940 he received Copenhagen University’s gold medal in zoology. He then assisted Holger Valdemar Brøndsted (who later had a chair in zoology at Copenhagen) at a school in Birkerød from 1941 until 1945 when the war ended. Jörgensen returned to Copenhagen and became assistant to Hans Ussing, of the eponymous Ussing Chamber, who was entering his heyday as the master of transcellular ion and water transport through his work on frog skin. Jörgensen himself looked at the effects of posterior pituitary hormones on salt and water movements.

Jörgensen remained at Copenhagen where he was professor from 1965 until he retired in 1985, pursuing a number of interests from suspension feeding, through salt and water metabolism to reproductive endocrinology. Most of his research was on the Common Toad, Bufo bufo. During the 1990s he published three major reviews including one on on the function of the bladder—huge in tortoises—from a historical perspective.

Humio Osaki (1916-2005) was in later life a medical protozoologist. In 1957 he was a research associate at Duke University working with Bodil and Knut Schmidt-Nielsen. How he came to be there I do not know because he had qualified in medicine in 1942, served as a medical officer in the Imperial Japanese Army until 1946 and then as a hospital clinician. After Duke University he was in academic medicine in Japan, finally at Tokushima and Kochi medical schools. As well as the paper on salt glands, Osaki also published with Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen on urea excretion in sheep, one of the key steps in the discovery of urea secretion (as opposed to simple filtration) by the mammalian kidney. Another co-author on Bodil’s urea paper is Roberta O’Dell who can be seen in a photograph helping in the salt-gland work with Osaki and Knut.

Humio Osaki (centre) with Roberta O'Dell and Knut
Schmidt-Nielsen working on salt glands in a gull at
Mount Desert Island(from Evans DH. 2015. Marine
Physiology Down East: The Story of Mt Desert Island
Biological Laboratory. New York: Springer

Humio Osaki working with Bodil
Schmidt-Nielsen on urea excretion (from here)

In the second phase of the salt-gland work, Ragnar Fänge (1920-1999) looms large. Another well-known animal physiologist who worked mainly on fish, he was another Scandinavian, this time Swedish. However, I have been able to find very little about him. I met him a few times but discovered nothing of his background or how he came to be involved with Knut Schmidt-Nielsen and salt glands—and I also forgot to ask Knut the same question. He was professor of zoophysiology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden from 1962 until 1985.

And so a Norwegian (KS-N), a Dane (CBJ), a Swede (RF) and a Japanese (HO) made history.