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Professor Denis Noble of the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, was honoured at the Royal Society event held on Friday 6 March celebrating 350 years of the world's first scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions.

The 1985 paper entitled "A model of cardiac electrical activity incorporating ionic pumps and concentration changes" by Denis Noble and Dario DiFrancesco, a former member of the Department, was selected for the Celebration's Phil Trans B theme issue.

Professor Denis Noble, President IUPS, commented: "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."

The two special issues of Phil Trans A and Phil Trans B have published commentaries on a highly selected set of papers from the whole 350 year history.

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, etc, nearly all of whom could not be present at the Celebration for obvious reasons. Just 3 articles amongst those honoured were by living authors, of whom only Professor Denis Noble was present at the event.