As part of this years preparations for the 61th Lindau Meeting of Nobel Laureates you can suggest a question on the subject of physiology and medicine to be asked the Nobel laureates. Here in mine.

There is no Nobel Prize in Medicine. It is the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. My question is about the "or" in the above name of the prize.

Form the viewpoint of both how research is done and the way these disciplines are taught, is this "or" as in

• (1) New York State or U.S.

For instance, "For New York State or U.S. stroke statistics, visit ...", i.e. physiology is part of medicine. Or is it more as in (More)

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Nature repeatedly reinvented certain control strategies shared among different body systems to maintain our physiological machinery. Each strategy not only works in a generic way and it also can fail in a generic way. Understanding these universal mechanisms can help to infer from symptoms the underlying pathology.

The two previous posts What is physiology? and Physiology organized by major body systems lay the basis. However, you don't have to read through these posts to understand this one.  (More)

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It may seems stubbornly self-centered, but it does make sense to organize physiology by the major human body systems. In fact in Europe, the minimum standard and learning outcomes in physiology will soon be organized this way thanks to the Bologna process.

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I am a physiologist. This is my outing in three parts. First, I will show that you cannot get easily an answer to What is physiology? In a second post, an answer is coming from the editorial of the current issue of Acta Physiologica, which aims at a harmonization between European physiology curricula. Finally, I will identify overarching concepts that define physiology. These concepts date back to the nineteenth centure but are still valid today.

Actually, I am a physicist—by training. I am a physiologist by heart.

Beginning with this posts, I will explain what physiology is. This and the subsequent posts are based on the first lecture that will be given in a new course called "Dynamical Diseases", which I am developing right now for the winter semester 2010 at the TU Berlin. I will start the course with the question:

What is physiology?

Of course I have a good idea what physiology is and I had it before I decided to develop this course. But once you teach, you need a thorough understanding of what you are talking about, even about short remarks within the introductory part of the first lecture. You never know what students might ask.

So I began a journey to  better understand what others think physiology is.

From the meaning of the word physiology in ancient Greek we deduce that it is the study of nature. But so is physics. And clearly physics and physiology are different disciplines.     

Physiology, Wikipedia (note that this post refers to the version in August)

Here is a simple answer from Wikipedia [1]: (More)

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