7 Swedish Neutrality and Leadership of the International Society for the Study of Biological Rhythm in the 1940s and 1950s

The second meeting of the International Society for the Study of Biological Rhythm was convened in Utrecht, 25-26 August 1939. If there had been hints that all was not well in Europe at the time of the 1937 meeting, the atmosphere must have been positively tense for the second one. Two days before the meeting began, Hitler and Stalin agreed to partition Poland (23 August), and Germany launched its offensive by the end of the next week ( 1 September), triggering World War II. The Society's planning had gone on in spite of the political tensions in Germany and the hostilities in the Far East, and, with the exception of Arthur Jores (from nearby Hamburg) and Hans Kalmus (German, but now a resident of London), the officers elected in Ronneby were from relatively neutral nations. Of the nine named in the published records of the Societas from the Utrecht meeting, the majority (five) were from Sweden, including the president, vice president, the secretarytreasurer, and the two auditors; and two were from Holland.1 This slate of officers was the same as that elected in Ronneby, with the addition of F. Gerritzen, the leader of the conference in Utrecht, as another board member.2The membership of the new Society had grown quickly since its formation. The report presented by the council to the membership at this 1939 meeting identified 68 members, and a footnote inserted before the publication of the proceedings in 1940 indicated that several new members had joined after the meeting. The total number identified by name in the published proceedings is 78, almost half of whom were Swedes (37), almost a sixth Germans (12), and the rest from other countries (5 Dutch, 5 American, 4 Swiss, 3 Norwegian, 3 Finnish, 2 Danish, and one member each from Algeria, Argentina, Italy, Canada, Turkey, England, and the Soviet Union).* Of the five members listed from the United States, John Welsh from Harvard was probably known in Europe, owing to his research on crustacean rhythms, and perhaps also T. H. -Bissonnette, who had published many articles, including one on photoperiodicity.4 William F. Petersen from Chicago was broadly interested in correlating the cyclical nature of all cosmic occurrences and not engaged in experimental scientific research specifically in biological rhythms, but his work is nevertheless referenced in the European literature. The same can be said of the Soviet member, Alexander Chizhevskii (spelled Tchijevsky in the list).Clearly, the Swedish members of the new Society dominated both its membership and leadership, and this dominance was also manifest financially. Whereas the proceedings of the 1937 meeting were later published in two issues of the German professional medical journal Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrifft at the authors' expense and without mention of the Societas, its leaders (no doubt mainly President Forsgren and Vice President Mollerstrom) had now secured a gift from Sweden's Consul-General, Hugo Duhs and his wife, to cover the costs of publishing the proceeds of the Utrecht meeting as a special issue of the Swedish-dominated medical journal, Aeta Medica Scandinavica. Control of the new Society was thus even more closely tied to Stockholm and de facto to medicine.5The 1939 meeting was formally opened by Erik Forsgren, who began by reporting on the foundation of the Society and its interdisciplinary nature:In August two years ago a small flock of Rhythm enthusiasts, representatives of botany, medicine, and zoology, gathered in Ronneby (Sweden) at the first international conference on biological rhythm research. Today we are pleased that so many distinguished scholars have accepted our invitation and complied, that besides the already mentioned sciences, mathematics and now meteorology are represented.6The creation of a new Society had clearly been warranted, he argued, both by the demand that was evident in the current turnout for the second meeting and by the special nature of the subject matter. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.