| RefNo | EC/1985/44 |
| Previous numbers | Cert XXI, 226 |
| Level | Item |
| Title | Schmidt-Nielsen, Knut: certificate of election to the Royal Society |
| Date | 1984 |
| Description | Certificate of Candidate for Election to Foreign Membership. Citation typed |
| Citation | Professor Knut Schmidt-Nielsen is without doubt the World's most distinguished and creative comparative physiologist. His field of study has covered examples from the whole animal kingdom and almost all the World's environments in order to discover how the former are adapted so successfully to life in the latter by subtle exploitation of the unchangeable laws of physics and chemistry. As the late Professor Torkel Weis-Fogh wrote, "……. Although firmly rooted in classical physiology and morphology, Schmidt-Nielsen is never conventional and is able to see new and surprising solutions and relationships. It is the mixture of classical scholarship and common sense with the innovating spirit of an artist which has led him and his collaborators to an understanding of how animals survive in deserts, the existence and function of the salt glands in birds and reptiles and, as it now seems, to the solution of a classical problem, the function of the bird's lung." To solve this last, and long-standing, problem Schmidt-Nielsen showed by a series of elegant experiments how a unidirectional gas flow through the bird's lung (achieved without valves) creates an efficient counter-current gas exchanger.
Schmidt-Nielsen's more recent work has mainly been concerned with elucidating the various tricks and devices that desert creatures employ to maintain water balance and body temperature in extremely hostile environments. |
| AccessStatus | Closed |
Fellows associated with this archive
| Code | PersonName | Dates |
| NA215 | Schmidt-Nielsen; Knut (1915 - 2007) | 1915 - 2007 |