On Friday 6th March, the Royal Society celebrated 350 years of the world's first scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions. Our President's cutting edge article on the heart model was honored among historical ones by Newton, Lister, Priestley, Herschel.
The 350 years Royal Society celebration included special issues of Phil Trans A and Phil Trans B which has published commentaries on a highly selected set of papers from the whole 350 year history:
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/2039
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1666
Just 17 articles from Phil Trans B, and 16 articles from Phil Trans A were selected for this honour. These include historical ones by household names: Newton, Lister, Priestley, Herschel, Davey, Telford, Faraday, Joule, Maxwell, Reynolds, Eddington, Fisher, Lonsdale, Milner, Leeuwenhoek, Sloane, Stone, Young, Gompertz, Turing, Medawar, Whittington, Brenner,....... nearly all of whom could not be present at the Celebration for obvious reasons. Just 4 articles amongst those honoured were by living authors, one of whom was present at the event. This is Denis Noble, whose 1986 paper with Dario DiFrancesco "A model of cardiac electrical activity incorporating ionic pumps and concentration changes" was selected:
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1666/20140316
Comment by Denis Noble, President VPH Institute: "It felt deeply moving to be present at this magnificent celebration as, I believe, the only representative of such a pantheon of greats in science from Isaac Newton and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the seventeenth century to Alan Turing and Peter Medawar in the twentieth. It is both an honour and a deeply humbling experience. No living scientist naturally feels it right to be included. I said nothing but felt their presence 'standing on the shoulders of giants', to quote Newton himself."
More information can be found on the Royal Society website
