Leonard Ernest Bayliss was a British physiologist and scientist. He is noted for his written works on physiology, such as Principles of General Physiology (1920), Human Physiology (1936), and Living Control Systems.
Background
Leonard Ernest Bayliss was born on November 15, 1900, in London, England. The youngest son of Sir William Maddock Bayliss and Gertrude Starling Bayliss, sister of the physiologist Ernest H. Starling, Bayliss grew up near Hampstead Heath, on the northern fringe of London. His parents entertained generously and attracted many overseas physiologists to meet their British colleagues in an atmosphere of tennis, good fellowship, and unending, searching arguments about the fundamentals of physical, biological, and medical sciences. Here his father had his private laboratory and workshop although, like Starling, he was also a professor in the physiological laboratory of University College, London. In such a home Bayliss developed his “do-it-yourself” attitude toward apparatus and his capacity for exacting and informed analysis of scientific problems.
Education
After graduating from University College School, a day school for boys fairly near his home, Bayliss entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and graduated in physiology in 1922. He stayed on in the physiology department as Michael Foster Student and in 1925 received the Ph.D. with the thesis “Tone in Plain Muscle.”
From 1926 to 1929 Bayliss was Sharpey Scholar at University College, and in 1928-1929 he worked under A. N. Richards at the University of Pennsylvania on a Rockefeller Fellowship; he returned in 1929 to University College, where he was awarded the Schäfer Prize (given for original work by a young physiologist associated with University College).
In 1933 Bayliss was appointed physiologist at the Marine Biological Station, Plymouth, and the following year he became lecturer in physiology at the University of Edinburgh, from which he “retired” in 1939, hoping to be free to prepare a revised version of his father’s famous book Principles of General Physiology, the last edition of which had appeared in 1924, soon after his father’s death. Bayliss returned to University College as an honorary part-time research assistant in the same year.
Bombing and fire interrupted Bayliss’ work in physiology in 1940, and he joined a group of pioneering scientists in the Army Operational Research Group, where he was later put in charge of research on antiaircraft gunnery and accuracy of fire against aircraft at various heights and against guided missiles.
Bayliss returned to physiology and to battered University College as a full-time reader from 1945 to 1950. He resigned in 1950 in order to concentrate on rewriting Principles of General Physiology but retained his room near the Medical Sciences Library at the college. His accessibility to students and colleagues continued, and he pursued his research and writing with the title of honorary research associate. He also made an important contribution to advanced teaching of physiology. By 1960 he had completed his project, entirely rewriting the Principles and expanding it to two volumes.
His bibliography reveals Bayliss’ wide interests in physical approaches to physiology and in relevant instrumentation, but he was a reluctant and unambitious publisher; much work never reached the journals at all or did so only in the papers of friends. His early papers on the pH of blood (1923, 1926) were written when the newly developed glass electrode, still of very high resistance, was connected to a delicate electrometer - quite a challenge even to skilled experimenters in the sulfurous atmospheres of towns. While at University College he also worked with Starling on the metabolism of dog heart-lung preparations; devised pump-oxygenator perfusion techniques for kidneys; and studied serotonins in defibrinated blood, water diuresis, and glomerular permeability in both cold-blooded and warm-blooded animals. His interest in invertebrates, as shown in a 1930 paper, was strengthened at the Plymouth Marine Biological Station.
The rheology of blood was a major but intermittent interest during Bayliss’ later years. It began about 1930 with Fahraeus’ papers showing that the viscosity of blood, relative to water in the same tube, diminished as the diameter diminished, down to 0.03 millimeters, at which point cells blocked the tube.
Bayliss had been making and using micropipettes and had encountered the problem of cell clumping in his blood perfusion experiments with pumps and tubes. He extended the range of tube diameters down as far as that of arterioles and found the apparent viscosity nearly halved. This finding was published as a “personal communication” by colleagues (1933) and again in the second edition of Human Physiology (1936). Bayliss’ first definitive paper on blood viscosity did not appear until 1952, and many experimental findings have remained unpublished.
Bayliss was a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a member of the Physiological Society, the Society for Experimental Biology, and the Marine Biological Association.
Personality
Bayliss was quietly courteous to students and friends but unyielding in essentials. A great deal of his time was always given to helping others, and he was sought after as perhaps the most learned, ingenious, and cooperative of English physiologists.
Among Bayliss' avocations were mountain climbing and playing the piano.
Physical Characteristics:
Bayliss was physically active and enjoyed good health throughout his life.
Interests
music
Sport & Clubs
mountain climbing
Connections
In 1939 Bayliss married M. Grace Palmer Eggleton, a physiologist at University College, whom he had known since about 1930. They took an apartment at the top of a tall old building near the college and, except for the early war years, lived there happily and frugally until his death. Also in the year of their marriage, they bought a weekend cottage, isolated in the East Sussex countryside, and Bayliss spent much energy and ingenuity in improving and enlarging both house and garden, in anticipation of their retirement in 1966.