The successful establishment of the ISB can be accredited largely to creative energy and interest on the part of its founders. Solco W. Tromp had already, by 1953, achieved a substantial bibliography on topics which we may refer to as biomedical science or medical geography. His remarkable productive energy continued to the time of his death in 1993. Figure 2 lists the output emanating from his laboratory, which included lectures, refereed papers, handbooks, and chapters in books. An example is the 687 page volume of Proceedings held at the Royal Society of London (Tromp, Ed, 1962).

His co-worker and friend, Wolf Weihe, has this to say about Tromp: "Scolo was highly internationally minded. As a geologist, he searched for oil in Indonesia, was interned during the war and then spent time in Cairo, Egypt. He then returned to Holland after a vast experience in coping with different climates. He belonged to an old family, important in Naval History. This seemed to give him a certain sovereignty to behave stubbornly and at times as a despot. This also helped him to build up an odd interdisciplinary science in spite of his lack of degree credentials."

Hans Ungeheuer represented a different approach to our field of discussion, with more of an emphasis on microclimates and botanical material. He was classified as a geophysicist. An outline of his work is found in Figure 3. Equally a stimulus to the society, and an active supporter of all of its aspects, was Frederick Sargent. Fred's undergraduate degree at MIT in 1942 was in meteorology, followed by a medical degree at Boston University in 1947. We were well aware of Fred's interest in "relations between the patient and the weather" because of the number of books and articles on this topic always to be found on his desk between 1942 and 1946. Both Landsberg and Petersen wrote books on this topic. We were surprised to find that this interest took Fred far afield. When I arrived by boat as the new director of the Bowdoin Biological Station on Kent Island in the Bay of Fundy in 1947, Fred had just left. The resident meteorologist who came each summer to study the climate around the island, Dr. Robert Cunningham, said that Fred Sargent had worked there for several summers. His remark was, "Fred knew that in this region of the Bay of Fundy there are, in meteorological terms, sudden changes with cold fronts changing to warm fronts, and the reverse. Fred and I worked together to try to find a correlation between these weather changes and some physiological measurements which he made on several of us. Actually, we did not find any pattern in the data."

The relationship between Fred Sargent and the development of the society is outlined in Figure 4. After the international society was formed in 1956, Fred Sargent was elected the first president. He established a plan within the society meetings which has lasted to the present day: the various areas of interest were designated as study groups, which organized speakers in the fashion of seminars. Fred continued in the adminsitration of the society up to the time of his early death. One of his large contributions was the design, with Champ Tanner, of a Biometeorology PhD Program, which will be described in more detail later in this paper.

Associated with Fred Sargent was Konrad Buettner, a founding member of the society as mentioned earlier. He might be best classified as a biophysicist. He was particularly interested in the relationship between the physical environment and human physiology when individuals are in environmental extremes. he was later to be called an "Environmental Physiologist." He collected much of his original data in the field, often a perilous endeavor. At one time a mule carrying his instruments fell off the trail on Mount Ranier, and his instruments were destroyed.