The International Academy of Cardiovascular Sciences is honoured to announce that Dr. Richard J. Bing has accepted appointment as a Fellow of the Academy.


Dr. Bing is also being recognized for his extraordinary lifetime achievements with the Medal of Merit from the Academy.


Dr. Bing was born in Nurnberg, Bavaria and is a U.S. citizen. After graduation with M.D.’s from the Universities of Munich and Bern, he chose to work on the culture of whole organs at the Rockefeller Institute in New York with Alexis Carrel, the surgeon who had won a Nobel Prize, and Charles Lindbergh, the “Lone Eagle” who made the famous solo flight to Paris in 1929 and was attracted to medical research where he made important contributions. After an internship in surgery at Columbia University, Dr. Bing worked for six years in physiology, first at Columbia and later at New York University, studying the mechanism of hypertension and of crush injuries. He then joined the staff of the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins as an instructor where he worked on neurogenic hypertension and also became a resident in medicine. After one year, he joined the U.S. Army, the chemical warfare division, studying the mechanisms of action of various agents. Dr. Bing then rejoined the Department of Surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital to work with Alfred Blalock and Helen Taussig on congenital heart disease.


After eight years, he joined the University of Alabama, working on the metabolism of the heart. He further pursued this subject as a Professor of Medicine at Washington University, in St. Louis, and as director of the Veterans Administration Medical Service. In 1959, Dr. Bing became Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he continued his studies in cardiac metabolism, and also began work on the feasibility of coincidence counting and the measurement of coronary flow and visualization of the heart in situ. Ten years later, he moved to Pasadena, California as Professor of Medicine at USC and Chief of Medicine and Cardiology at the Huntington Memorial Hospital, and as Director of Experimental Cardiology at Huntington Medical Research Institutes. His initiative focused on new methods of visualizing the coronary microcirculation by transillumination and the metabolism of the heart after myocardial infarction. He is now working on the mechanism of the COX-2 enzyme in the kidney and heart, and its inhibition by non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.


Dr. Bing has been awarded honourary degrees by the German Academy of Medicine, University of Bologna, and Johns Hopkins University. In recognition of Dr. Bing’s contribution as a founder, the International Society for Heart Research instituted the “Richard Bing Award for the Best Young Investigator in the Field of Heart Research”. In 2001, he received the Presidential Citation of the American College of Cardiology.


Dr. Bing has often expressed that he has a good time doing his work and wishes that it could last forever. In addition to medicine, he is addicted to music which, he says, has given him the opportunity to weather the vicissitudes of life.