Remembering a great physiologist and his gift to physiology
The Physiological Society of Sri Lanka (PSSL) annually honours the second Ceylonese Professor of Physiology, K.N. Seneviratne. Regarded as one of the most eminent physiologists Sri Lanka has ever produced, ad made a momentous contribution to physiology and postgraduate medical education in Sri Lanka.
Keerthi Nissanka Seneviratne was born in Southern Sri Lanka in 1929. He had his school education at the Royal College, Colombo and university education at the Colombo Medical School. He graduated with MBBS honours in 1954 with a distinction in Medicine and a gold medal in Operative Surgery. Unsurprisingly, in the second MB examination, he obtained a distinction in physiology.
He joined the Colombo Medical School’s Physiology Department as a lecturer in 1958. He acquired a PhD in neurophysiology, and his life partner, Alison, from Edinburgh, UK. He was appointed to the Chair of Physiology in the Faculty of Medicine, Colombo at the age of 39 and held this post for 13 years.
Many distinguished academics, clinicians and scientists have paid tribute to him by delivering the annual K.N. Seneviratne memorial oration, with the inaugural oration being delivered in 1987 by his PhD supervisor, Prof David Whitteridge FRS whose claim to fame was that he was the last direct pupil of the great Oxford Neurophysiologist, Sir Charles Sherrington OM, Nobel Laureate and President of the prestigious Royal Society of London founded in 1661.
Prof Whitteridge described Professor Seneviratne as “very intelligent, quick and accurate in analysis, careful and critical in dealing with data and their interpretations, persistent and skilled as an experimentalist, exceptionally clear and logical in presenting his work”. What more a supervisor could have asked from a PhD student?
Prof Seneviratne’s immediate successor to the Chair of Physiology in Colombo, Professor Carlo Fonseka, writing in a newspaper article on the day prior to the inaugural oration had this to say of Prof Seneviratne: “This large-hearted giant of a man was spontaneously self-effacing, consciously non-competitive, disarmingly non-aggressive and pathologically publicity shy”.
In 1981, Prof Seneviratne left Sri Lanka to take up an appointment with the World Health Organisation, as Regional Advisor in Health Manpower Development. His untimely death in 1986, at the age of 56, left a void in the field of physiology which to date has not been filled.
To sum up the life and work of this great personality, I have to turn back again to Prof Carlo Fonseka who once said that “I have now realised that a ceremonial oration does not provide enough space for a comprehensive survey of the many splendoured personality and multifaceted work of K N Seneviratne – a scholar, doctor, physiologist, scientist, educationist, humorist, internationalist, administrator, volunteer army captain and a university don.”
To commemorate this great gentleman, this year’s K.N. Seneviratne memorial oration will be delivered by Prof Deepthi De Silva on a very timely topic “Insights into Physiology through the study of rare genetic diseases”.
Deepthi de Silva is currently a professor in Medical Genetics at the Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Kelaniya.
Her primary education was at Visakha Vidyalaya Colombo and she completed her secondary education at Albyn School in Aberdeen, Scotland. She graduated in Medicine from the Medical Faculty, University of Aberdeen and after following general medical and paediatrics training, she obtained the MRCP (UK). She was a research fellow at the Department of Medical Genetics, University of Aberdeen. She completed her clinical training in the subspecialty of Clinical Genetics also in Aberdeen and is an accredited Consultant Clinical Geneticist registered in the General Medical Council, UK.
She joined the Faculty of Medicine in Ragama and continued her clinical interest in medical genetics. She has more than 40 publications with more than 970 citations, including an h-index of 17 and an i10-index of 21. She is involved in teaching physiology and genetics to both undergraduate and postgraduate students.
She was the President of the Physiological Society of Sri Lanka in 2013-2014 and a Vice President of SAAP from 2014-2016. She has been a member of the board of study in Basic and Medical Sciences at the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine as well as a member of the Board of study in Molecular Medicine, also at the PGIM. She was a member of the three-person task force developing the regulatory framework and ethical guidelines for nanotechnology research and applications, coordinated by the National Research Council.
She was a member of the National Science Foundation working committee on Biotechnology. She has recently been appointed to the Editorial Board of the Journal of Child Health and the ethics review committee of the Sri Lanka Paediatric association. She is a life member of the British Society of Human Genetics and the Sri Lanka College of Paediatrics.
It will be a great tribute to Prof Seneviratne, that the 35th memorial oration will be delivered by Prof. Deepthi de Silva, a brilliant academic in Physiology in the Faculty of Medicine, Kelaniya. The oration will be held at the BMICH, Colombo at 8.30 am on November 12, 2022.