63rd APS President (1990-1991)
Shu Chien
(b. 1931)
Shu Chien was installed as the 63th President of the American
Physiological Society at the close of the Society's spring meeting in
Washington, DC.
Chien, a professor of bioengineering and medicine at the University of
California, San Diego, succeeds Vernon S. Bishop.
A 23-year member of APS, Chien has served on the editorial boards of the
American Journal of Physiology, the Journal of Applied Physiology,
and the American Journal of Physiology: Heart and Circulatory Physiology.
He also has been an active contributor to the Society's educational
programs, including the slide-tape program on peripheral circulation and the
Handbook of Physiology: Circulation. In 1985, he was elected to the
APS Council by the membership and last ear was elected President-elect.
Chien comes to the APS presidency with years of experience serving
scientific societies, including president of the Microcirculatory Society,
president of the American-Chinese Medical Society, and chairman of the
steering committee of the North American Society of Biorheology. He also
helped Academia Sinica in Taiwan to establish the Institute of Biomedical
Sciences.
The 58-year-old Chien is the fifth president from California and the
first of Asian origin to be elected president of the 104-year-old Society.
He was born in Peiping (now Beijing) and grew up in Shanghai.
Chien went to the National Peking University for his premedical education
and then the medical school of the National Taiwan University. After
completing his medical education and an internship, Chien decided to devote
his career to basic science research and teaching.
He was awarded a Li Foundation fellowship to come to the United States to
study physiology at Columbia University's College of Physicians and
Surgeons. Under the advisorship of Dr. Magnus Gregersen, he performed his
doctoral dissertation research on the role of the sympathetic nervous system
in compensatory mechanisms to hemorrhage.
Following his graduation in 1957, Chien remained at Columbia, where he
served for a year as an instructor and, in 1958, was promoted to assistant
professor of physiology. During the late 1950s and early 1960s Chien
continued his research on hemorrhage and shock (including that induced by
x-irradiation, histamine, endotoxin, and pericardial tamponade) with
emphasis on the roles of neurohumoral regulation, blood volume, and
capillary permeability. In the course of these studies, he discovered that
changes in flow properties of the blood also may play a significant role in
some of these conditions.
By 1964, when he was promoted to associate professor, Chien's research
emphasis had shifted to the mechanisms controlling blood viscosity. In such
studies, biophysical and engineering principles and techniques are used to
study physiological problems. As a result, he began working closely with
engineering colleagues, developing novel interdisciplinary approaches at the
interface of biology, medicine, and engineering.
In 1969 he was appointed director of the Division of Circulatory
Physiology and Biophysics and promoted to the rank of full professor. By the
early 1970s Chien had become a leading authority in blood rheology, largely
because of his elucidation of the fundamental mechanisms governing blood
viscosity, including red cell deformation and aggregation. He began applying
such basic knowledge to investigate rheological abnormalities in a variety
of diseases, including sickle cell, paraproteinemias, acute myocardial
infarction, hypertension, and surgical conditions. For his contributions in
these studies Chien was awarded the first Fahraeus Medal of Clinical
Hemorheology in 1981.
While applying blood rheology to clinical investigations, Chien also
began to probe into microrheology of blood at the levels of cells and
membranes and into the influence of blood rheology on blood flow in vivo,
especially microcirculation. In recognition of these accomplishments, Chien
was given the Landis Award in Microvascular Research in 1983.
For the last five years, Chien's research has extended into the molecular
biology of red blood cell membrane proteins and the molecular basis of
cell-cell interactions. In pursuing these studies at the molecular level,
Chien has continued to keep his focus on the more global problems at the
organ-system level. His long-term goal in working on the molecular structure
of erythrocyte membrane skeletal proteins is to provide the information
needed to deduce the microarchitecture of the membrane skeleton, so he can
proceed to interpret microrheological findings on single cells and,
eventually, flow and deformation in the circulation in health and disease.
Chien also is performing experiments on the effects of blood cell
properties on regional blood flow distribution in intact animals. The
ultimate goal is to experimentally manipulate the molecular structure of the
erythrocyte membrane skeleton and to determine the consequence on blood flow
in vivo.
Chien's research career is characterized by his learning and application
of new concepts and technology to solve fundamental physiological problems.
His interdisciplinary approach to physiological research on the role of
blood cells in blood flow spans a wide spectrum of objects ranging from
molecules to cells, tissues, organs, and the whole body. The scheme he
published in his Landis Award lecture to represent this approach is the
basis of a diagram used by APS to summarize modern physiological research
activities.
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