August Krogh and Claude Bernard on Basic Principles in Experimental Physiology

Abstract

The so-called August Krogh principle—“For many problems there is an animal on which it can be most conveniently studied”—has attained great popularity in the biological literature since it was formulated by Hans Krebs in 1975. Sometimes the reference to Krogh (1929) and his use of the “principle” is, however, misleading or incorrect. Thus, Feder and Watt (1992) cite Krogh for having articulated the principle that “for every biological question is an organism best suited to its solution,” and a recent textbook on animal physiology states that “one of the reasons for Krogh's extraordinary success as a physiologist was his uncanny ability to choose just the right experimental animal with which to test his hypotheses. His view was that for every defined physiological problem, there was an optimally suited animal that would most efficiently yield an answer” (Randall et al. 1997). Participants in a roundtable on the application of the Krogh principle to plants introduced a corollary: “No single organism…exists that can provide easy access to the diversity of hidden mechanisms that underlie all interesting and important physiological and biochemical problems” (Wayne and Staves 1996). This corollary is, however, not a consequence of the principle as formulated by Krogh (1929).

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