Oliver Murray Wrong

摘要

Oliver Wrong spent a lifetime applying his considerable intellect to an exploration of one of the fundamentals of human physiology: the changing composition of our body fluids, and their consequences for health. In the course of this endeavour his insatiable curiosity led him to study the colon of the camel, and even to invite his own family to swallow sampling devices that allowed him to glean insights into the chemistry of the human intestine.He was still in an early phase of his career when a 1959 Quarterly journal of Medicine paper on "The excretion of acid in renal disease" marked him out as a man to be watched. "There are specific conditions in which the only kidney defect is that it fails to excrete acid well", says Steve Scheinman, professor of medicine and pharmacology at New York's Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, who first met Wrong in the early 1990s. "As children these individuals don't grow, their nutrition is poor, and their bones become brittle. These are all consequences of the build up of acid." Wrong's paper described a test to measure the kidney's ability to excrete acid. The test, which relies on administering ammonium chloride and monitoring the removal of the resultant hydrochloric acid, is still in use.