The Love of Physiology

Under the Microscope: The Love of Physiology

Uncovering and embracing creative thinking in science.

Arohan Subramanya, MD, is associate professor of medicine and cell biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and a staff physician at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Pittsburgh Healthcare System. His research program is devoted to understanding how the renal tubule controls electrolyte homeostasis and, more broadly, how cells throughout the body control their size and fluid volume. 

Finding science. I’m a physician-scientist who gravitated toward research late in my training. I developed an interest in kidney physiology and disease early in medical school, but I thought I would be pursuing those interests as a private practice nephrologist. While I was on renal consults as a second-year medical resident, my attending physician, Sharon Anderson, encouraged me to do a rotation in her lab. That experience was eye-opening, as I found the process of testing hypotheses, troubleshooting experiments and making discoveries in the lab to be exciting. As someone with lifelong interests in music and art, once I realized that effective science requires different types of creative thinking, I was hooked.

Acknowledging science heroes. If I could meet any scientist living or dead, it would be John Parker, MD, a legendary cell physiologist and clinical hematologist who worked at the University of North Carolina. In the 1980s, Parker designed a series of ingenious experiments in red blood cells that led him to conclude that cells detect crowdedness and use this sensing mechanism to control their size and fluid volume. He unfortunately died when he was in his 50s. If he was still alive today, it would have been an honor to shake his hand and tell him that while it took us a while to catch up to his vision, he was right all along.

As a side note, Nobel laureate Peter Agre, MD, credits Parker as the first person to suggest to him that the proteins we now refer to as “aquaporins” might be water channels. And, as noted in Agre’s Nobel Lecture, Parker came up with this stroke of brilliance after an exhausting day of clinic! Amazing and inspiring.

Pros and cons. My least favorite part of my job would have to be all the training modules I have to take as a researcher at both the university and VA and as a VA clinician. A lot of these exercises are overly redundant and time-consuming nuisances that do little to make me better at my job. 

But enough of that! My favorite thing by far is mentoring researchers in the lab. It’s great when someone in our group works hard—sometimes for years—on a difficult problem and eventually develops a new method or discovers something new. It can be incredibly empowering for them, and it makes me grateful to be a part of their success. 

Embrace your identity. There are a lot of scientists out there who don’t realize that they’re physiologists. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re studying “functional relevance,” you’re a physiologist. That’s what we do, and we should point it out to folks who may not be aware of that. 

Do you know someone we should meet? Email us at tphysmag@physiology.org and tell us more.

This article was originally published in the September 2024 issue of The Physiologist Magazine. Copyright © 2024 by the American Physiological Society.