Sunday Times 2
Physiology was his forte
View(s):- K.N. Seneviratne Oration 2024
By Susirith Mendis, Emeritus Professor, University of Ruhuna
The 37th K.N. Seneviratne Oration 2024 will be held at the Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, on Saturday, November 23 at 8.50 a.m., in conjunction with the annual sessions of the Physiological Society of Sri Lanka.
Much has been written about Prof. Keerthi Nissanka Seneviratne’s life and work by his academic colleagues, generations of admiring students, and those who knew him as a sincere friend. I was fortunate to be one of his students at the tail end of his life as a physiology teacher at the Colombo Medical School.
Keerthi Nissanka Seneviratne was born in Elpitiya, Galle, on November 22, 1929, as the second son of Dr. Robert and Mrs. Laura Seneviratne. He came from a privileged family. His father, Robert Seneviratne, was a doctor trained in Edinburgh, Scotland, where subsequently Prof. Seneviratne obtained his research doctorate.
He had his primary and secondary education at Royal College, Colombo. He obtained his MBBS degree with honours in 1954 from the University of Ceylon, Colombo, gaining a distinction in Medicine and winning the Gold Medal for Operative Surgery.
After completing his clinical training, he joined the Department of Physiology of the Colombo Medical School on secondment as a demonstrator in 1957. Due to his interest in research, he went to the UK and obtained his Ph.D from the University of Edinburgh. Having rejoined the Department of Physiology at the Faculty of Medicine, Colombo, he was promoted to the post of Professor of Physiology at the young age of 39 in 1969 and held the post until 1981.
Prof. Seneviratne’s distinguished career was cut short by a massive heart attack he suffered in August 1986. His career highlights include, in particular, his exemplary research and teaching career at the Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine Colombo; his pioneering but short stint as the Founder Director of the Institute of Postgraduate Medicine (IPGM) that has subsequently transformed into the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine (PGIM); and his unfinished tasks at the World Health Organisation’s South-East Asia Regional Office in New Delhi.
His groundbreaking efforts to bring postgraduate medicine into Sri Lanka amidst much opposition from the medical establishment have been grossly underestimated and gone almost unrecognised. I consider it a ‘revolution’ of sorts that transformed postgraduate medicine in Sri Lanka.
The Institute of Postgraduate Medicine, which later became the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, was established by Prof. K.N. Seneviratne in 1974, and he was the founder director until he was appointed as a Regional Advisor to the World Health Organisation in 1981.
He earned the immense respect of his peers, as he was undoubtedly the ‘primus inter pares’ among them. He earned the respect of lesser men, not by his position or authority but, I believe, by an abundance of innate humility, humour and humanism. Prof. Seneviratne was different in so many ways. He—and Prof. Leicester Jayewardene—came to work in white bush shirts and often in sandals. Prof. Seneviratne and Prof. Jayewardene showed me early on that contrary to Mark Twain’s dictum that ‘clothes do not make the man’.
Of those who knew him intimately, Prof. Carlo Fonseka was perhaps one of the closest. Prof. Fonseka’s description of him in ‘The Island’ on November 21, 1987, to my mind, fits best and exemplifies the multi-faceted nature of his personality: “This large-hearted giant of a man was spontaneously self-effacing, consciously non-competitive, disarmingly non-aggressive, and pathologically publicity-shy.” Prof. Seneviratne was a rare, gentle giant of a man.”
I have not found an explanation of why Prof. Seneviratne chose physiology for his specialisation and future professional career and not a clinical one. I believe his strong research profile was fired by an urge to ‘search and find’ new information that had eluded medical researchers until then. Perhaps he was also attracted to the discipline of physiology by the intrinsic scientific logic of its basic principles.
Therefore, what better way to commemorate him than an oration in his name by the Physiological Society of Sri Lanka?
This year’s orator will be Prof. Savithri Wimalasekera, Professor in Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Sri Jayewardenepura. Prof. Wimalasekera obtained her MBBS degree from the North Colombo Medical College in 1991, her MPhil from the University of Colombo in 2002, and her PhD from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura in 2009. She has 30 years of experience in teaching physiology at both the universities of Sri Jayewardenepura and the General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University. Her main research interests are in the fields of clinical neurophysiology and respiratory physiology. She has co-authored seven books on student aids in physiology, published many research papers in peer-reviewed journals, and won many awards for her research papers and presentations. Furthermore, she has been president of the Physiological Society of Sri Lanka and vice president of the South Asian Association of Physiologists (SAAP), also the Secretary General of SAAP.
The title of her oration will be ‘Cognition through a Lifespan: Perspectives from Sri Lanka’. She will speak on the many aspects that affect cognitive development during childhood, adolescence and young adulthood and also on a few factors that can help in the development of cognition during the early years of life. She also hopes to speak on the decline in cognition with ageing and some measures that can be adopted to retard the rate of cognitive decline with ageing.