Abstract
Sometime about 1962, at an annual meeting of the Society of Rheology in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada, I met Harry Goldsmith. Since that time, we have had many occasions to meet. We shared many hotel rooms at scientific meetings; spent 3 research months in 1988 in Peter Gaehtgen’s laboratory at the Freie Universität Berlin, in what then was West Berlin; had several joint visits to Yellowstone National Park in the USA, and drove together over the Beartooth Highway in Wyoming-Montana, through the Beartooth Pass (elevation 10974 feet above sea level); and I had a punting lesson from Dr. Goldsmith on the hallowed waters of Oxford University. On these many occasions, under a wide diversity of conditions (and many more than mentioned here), I was able to observe the abilities and characteristics of Dr. Goldsmith, and, not surprisingly, my conclusions about these matters as they concern Dr. Goldsmith are in complete agreement with those expressed by Shu Chien in his neighboring Laudatio.
Harry is an excellent theoretical and experimental scientist, and justly deserves the awards that he has been given. He has always been generous with his assistance to young and old investigators who ask for his opinion and help. As Shu Chien has said, “Harry Goldsmith is a superb scientist, a great teacher, and a marvelous leader”.
However, I would not want to leave the reader with the idea that Harry is not human. He does have some rare faults. While we were visiting Peter Gaehtgens in 1988, I discovered that Harry could not tell north from south. However, he has the saving grace that he can memorize timetables, so when we were going about in West Berlin, as long as the two of us were together, we could always arrive at a destination with the least use of time and effort.
With this issue of Biorheology, Harry’s long editorship of the journal has been given special recognition. With the first issue of volume 31 (January–February 1994), Harry started his editorship, with Pedro Verdugo as a co-editor, of Biorheology, and over the time from the first issue of volume 33 (January–February 1996), he alone has shouldered the editorship until the first issue of 2014 (volume 51), and has continued to assist in the editorial process to the present. Over his 20 years, he has continuously devoted a large fraction of his time and effort to convincing workers in the biorheology area (and impinging areas) to submit manuscripts to the journal. Of course, not all submissions were acceptable in their presented form, and with the help of reviewers, he convinced the authors of many manuscripts to modify the manuscripts so that they were in a publishable form. The response that authors received from Harry was always very polite and helpful, giving advice and suggestions (sometimes very detailed) on how to improve their submissions. Even so, it was a continuous struggle to convince excellent researchers to publish in Biorheology, rather than in international journals that have huge readerships and in which articles gain large numbers of citations. The “publish or perish” atmosphere made it difficult for Harry to attract sufficient numbers of significant papers for the smaller specialized journal, Biorheology. In spite of all these hurdles, Harry kept this journal viable, with meaningful contributions from outstanding workers in this scientific field, clearly due to his motto:
Quality always first.