Sir William Maddock Bayliss (2 May 1860 – 27 August 1924) was an English physiologist.
School period
College/University
Gallery of William Bayliss
University College, London, England, United Kingdom
When, in 1880, the elder Bayliss moved to London, William continued his studies at University College, London, where in 1881 he gained a medical entrance exhibition and a science exhibition at the preliminary scientific examination. In 1882 he took the Bachelor of Science degree with a scholarship in zoology and physics.
Gallery of William Bayliss
Wadham College, Oxford University, Parks Road, Oxford, England, United Kingdom
Bayliss studied at the Wadham College, Oxford University, Physiology department.
Career
Gallery of William Bayliss
1878
William Bayliss aged only 18.
Gallery of William Bayliss
William Bayliss
Gallery of William Bayliss
William Bayliss
Gallery of William Bayliss
Portrait of Sir William Maddock Bayliss (1860-1924).
Achievements
Membership
Royal Society of London
1903 - 1924
In 1903 William Bayliss was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, serving on its council from 1913 to 1915.
Awards
Royal Medal
1911
Bayliss was awarded the Royal Medal.
Baly Medal
1917
Bayliss was awarded the Baly Medal of the Royal College of Physicians.
Copley Medal
1919
Bayliss was awarded the Copley Medal from the Royal Society.
University College, London, England, United Kingdom
When, in 1880, the elder Bayliss moved to London, William continued his studies at University College, London, where in 1881 he gained a medical entrance exhibition and a science exhibition at the preliminary scientific examination. In 1882 he took the Bachelor of Science degree with a scholarship in zoology and physics.
Connections
collaborator: Ernest Henry Starling
Ernest Henry Starling (17 April 1866 – 2 May 1927) was a British physiologist.
Sir William Maddock Bayliss was a British physiologist. He is known as a collaborator with Ernest Starling, the two of them discovering the peristaltic wave, contractions within the digestive tract to move food forward through the system. They also discovered in 1902 the hormone secretin which causes the pancreas to secrete juices for the aid of digestion. He also demonstrated the function of the intestinal enzyme trypsin.
Background
William Bayliss was born on May 2, 1860, in Wednesbury, Staffordshire, United Kingdom, in the family of Moses and Jan (Maddock) Bayliss. His father was a manufacturer of galvanized goods and founder of the Wolverhampton firm of Bayliss, Jones, and Bayliss.
Education
William received his early education at a private school in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, and was then apprenticed to a local general practitioner. When, in 1880, the elder Bayliss moved to London, William continued his studies at University College, London, where in 1881 he gained a medical entrance exhibition and a science exhibition at the preliminary scientific examination. In 1882 he took the Bachelor of Science degree with a scholarship in zoology and physics and began to study physiology and anatomy, but at the second Bachelor of Medicine examination, he failed in anatomy. He then relinquished medical studies to concentrate on physiology.
Two men who influenced him at this stage were John Burdon-Sanderson, Jodrell professor of physiology at University College, and Ray Lankester, professor of zoology. Physiology was at that time emerging as a subject separate from anatomy, and the Jodrell chair, founded in 1874, was the first separate chair of physiology in Great Britain.
When the Waynflete chair of physiology was established at Oxford in 1882, Burdon-Sanderson was elected to it, and in 1885 Bayliss followed him to Oxford as an undergraduate of Wadham College. He took a first-class degree in physiology in 1888 and then returned to University College, where, in the meantime, E. A. Schafer (afterward Sir Edward Sharpey-Schafer) had succeeded to the Jodrell chair.
Bayliss worked for the remainder of his life at University College, first as an assistant, then in 1903 as an assistant professor, and from 1912 onward as professor of general physiology. After his father’s death in 1895, Bayliss returned to live in the family home in Hampstead, London.
Bayliss was elected to membership in the Physiological Society in 1890 and served as secretary from 1900 to 1922, and treasurer from 1922 to 1924. He was an editor of Physiological Abstracts from 1923 to 1924, and joint editor of the Biochemical Journal from 1913 to 1924. In 1903 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, serving on its council from 1913 to 1915.
During World War I he served on the Food (War) Committee of the Royal Society, and on the Wound Shock Committee of the Medical Research Committee; he visited the front in France in 1917. From 1917 to 1924 he served on the Medical Research Council’s committee to study the biological action of light.
In 1922 he visited the United States to deliver the Herter lectures at Baltimore, a Harvey lecture at New York, and to talk to the Research Club at Harvard.
The placid tenor of his life was interrupted in 1903 by the urgent necessity to take out an action for libel against Stephen Coleridge, secretary of the National Antivivisection Society. The trial, before the lord chief justice, occupied four days and Bayliss won the day, with £2,000 damages. He presented the money to University College for the furtherance of research in physiology. The interest on the capital sum is still used for that purpose.
Bayliss’ generation entered the scene at the beginning of a period of the exponential growth of science, and his outlook can be seen as a projection into the twentieth century of that of Claude Bernard (1814-1878), Ludwig (1816-1895), and Helmholtz (1821-1894).
The foundations of Hoppe-Seyler’s Zeitschrift fur physiologische Chemie (1877) and Ostwald’s Zeitschrift fur physikalische Chemie (1887) were harbingers of what was to follow, and Bayliss availed himself of the tools offered by these new subjects.
When Bayliss started at University College, electrophysiology was the central feature of the research work in the department. Bayliss worked with Dr. (afterward Sir John) Rose Bradford in studying, with the aid of a Thomson galvanometer, the changes in electric potential involved in the act of secretion, first in the salivary glands of a frog and then in the skin. In his second paper, “The Electromotive Phenomena of the Mammalian Heart,” he collaborated with Starling, partly at Oxford; they were able to use the relatively rapidly responding capillary electrometer, which Lippmann had introduced in 1873. The hearts of mammals, frog, tortoise, and man (the two authors) were studied, the electrical changes were shown to be triphasic, and the time relations of the cardiac cycle observed.
His work on vascular system, which was begun in 1892 with Starling, resulted in two papers, one on a new form of optically registered blood pressure apparatus and one “On Some Points in the Innervation of the Mammalian Heart.” He also worked with Bradford on the innervation of the vessels of the limbs. At about this same time, he began his own investigations, starting with the physiology of the depressor nerve, which led on to an examination of vasomotor reactions in general and of their central coordination. The nature of the antidromic reaction, which he showed to be an axon reflex, was another important outcome of this work. By 1894 Bayliss and Starling were working on circulatory problems, including venous and capillary pressures and intraventricular and aortic pressure curves.
The partners now turned their attention to the study of the movements of the small and large intestines, and of their innervation. The most important result of this work was the elucidation of the peristaltic wave.
Bayliss’ interest in pancreatic secretion led him, with Starling, to study the anomalous secretion of pancreatic juice which occurred when acid was introduced into the duodenum. At that time the only known means by which glands were excited to secrete was by the mediation of secretory nerves, as exemplified by the pioneering work of Ludwig (1851) on the submaxillary gland. Pavlov had shown that secretion of pancreatic juice was evoked on stimulation of the vagus nerves, but it could also be produced by the introduction of acid into the upper intestine, even after section of both vagi; this acid-provoked secretion, he concluded, could only be brought about by a local reflex from the intestinal mucosa. Bayliss and Starling showed, however, that introduction of acid into the duodenum still induced secretion of pancreatic juice after the division of both vagi and of all the nerves to the upper intestine, so that the only means of communication of the pancreas with the intestine was via the bloodstream. The excitant must, therefore, be not nervous but a chemical stimulus, a substance derived from the intestine and carried in the bloodstream to the pancreas, which is excited to secrete. This they proved by showing that the intravenous injection of an acid extract of intestinal mucosa resulted in the secretion of pancreatic juice. They called the excitant substance secretin, and thus recognized the existence of a new class of chemical messengers, the hormones, a name first promulgated by Starling in his Croonian lecture of 1905, in which he foreshadowed other hormone actions.
Bayliss and Starling next studied the activation of trypsin in the pancreatic juice. As secreted, the juice has no proteolytic action, but it becomes activated by contact with enterokinase in the intestinal juice. Pavlov regarded this activation to be the result of an enzyme action by which the precursor, trypsinogen, was converted into the active form, trypsin, by the separation from it of part of its molecule. Opponents had thought of the action as a combination between inactive enzyme and activator. Bayliss and Starling gave support to Pavlov’s view by showing that the reaction was catalytic and not stoichiometric.
Bayliss now turned to study enzyme action, in the light of physical chemistry. He used trypsin as the enzyme, caseinogen or gelatin as substrate, and followed the course of the digestion by measurement of the electrical conductivity, correlated with other measurements such as viscosity, refractive index, optical rotation, osmotic pressure, etc. These studies led on to further work on the velocity of enzyme action, final equilibria, reversibility, and the effect of temperature, in the course of which he showed that enzyme action is largely influenced by adsorption effects in which there is a combination between enzyme and substrate, a viewpoint developed by Michaelis and Menten in 1913.
Bayliss’ study of the osmotic pressure of Congo red, showing that this colloid exerted the same osmotic pressure that it would if it were in true solution, led on to the study of the electrical equilibrium set up when Congo red and sodium chloride solutions are separated by a semipermeable membrane. This work gave support to the studies of Donnan on the theory of membrane equilibria, and its relation to Nernst’s equation for a concentration cell.
Bayliss attended an Anglo-Catholic church but was largely tolerant in religious matters.
Politics
Politically, Bayliss was somewhat to the left of liberal, with sympathy for reasonable minority movements, but had little interest in politics as such.
Views
To Bayliss all science was one, although fundamentally he was a biologist who was deeply interested in the emergence of physical chemistry and biochemistry and in their relations to the problems of general physiology.
Bayliss was particularly interested in electrophysiology, and in collaboration with Professor Ernest Henry Starling, he researched the salivary system, the circulatory system and the heart, the flow of lymph, and the motions of the intestine. Bayliss was, with Starling, the discoverer of secretin (1902), an intestinal hormone of aid to pancreatic secretion. In 1905 his interest turned to physiological chemistry, and he developed a saline injection for the treatment of surgical shock, which proved of considerable value during World War I.
Quotations:
“But, as Bacon has well pointed out, truth is more likely to come out of error, if this is clear and definite, than out of confusion, and my experience teaches me that it is better to hold a well-understood and intelligible opinion, even if it should turn out to be wrong, than to be content with a muddle-headed mixture of conflicting views, sometimes miscalled impartiality, and often no better than no opinion at all.”
“But at the same time, there must never be the least hesitation in giving up a position the moment it is shown to be untenable. It is not going too far to say that the greatness of a scientific investigator does not rest on the fact of his having never made a mistake, but rather on his readiness to admit that he has done so, whenever the contrary evidence is cogent enough.”
Membership
Bayliss was elected to membership in the Physiological Society in 1890 and served as secretary from 1900 to 1922. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1903. He was also elected a member to the Royal Danish Academy of Science, the Royal Academy of Belgium, and the Société de Biologie of Paris.
Royal Society of London
,
United Kingdom
1903 - 1924
Personality
Bayliss loved to have young physiologists about him and they loved his company. Bayliss was fond of music and played the violin. He was of a merry and gentle disposition, good with his hands, and would accept little help from others, although he gladly gave his own. Photography was more than a hobby to him; the illustrations for his books and papers were his own work.
The frequent coupling together of the names of Bayliss and Starling in important publications might lead to the inference that their partnership was an essential condition for either or both of them, but nothing could be further from the truth. They were both great physiologists and in their collaboration were largely complementary. Bayliss was the more fundamental and erudite, but of a retiring disposition; Starling was a pragmatic and forceful extrovert, with an essentially medical outlook. Bayliss preferred to work alone, without even technical help, but collaboration was imposed upon them for a time; until a new Institute of Physiology was built there was inadequate space and equipment in the department. After 1909 they never collaborated, although they frequently conferred at the daily tea meetings.
His quiet generosity, his kindliness, his self-effacing modesty, and his simple goodness endeared him to all his fellow physiologists. His knowledge, though exhaustive, was never overbearing, and his genius was never frightening - probably because his mind did not work rapidly.
Physical Characteristics:
Until shortly before his death from a blood dyscrasia, Bayliss' health was excellent most of the time.
Interests
music, photography
Sport & Clubs
lawn-tennis
Connections
In 1893 William Bayliss married Gertrude Ellen Starling, the sister of Ernest Starling. He had three sons and one daughter; the youngest son, Leonard (1900-1964), was also a physiologist. Bayliss was well-off financially and lived a happy married life in his large house, set in a four-acre garden with two tennis courts and a private laboratory, the Baylisses entertained often and liberally, mainly colleagues and visiting physiologists.