Dr. Richard J. Bing, cardiac researcher, dies at 101

LOS ANGELES - Dr. Richard J. Bing, a research cardiologist, composer and author who has been called a "Renaissance man" and "a man for all seasons," died Monday at his home in the Los Angeles-area community of La Canada Flintridge. He turned 101 a month earlier and had been suffering from heart disease.

One of the last surviving Jewish scientists who fled Nazi Germany, Bing played a major role in the golden age of heart surgery in the 1950s and '60s, exploring cardiac metabolism, cardiac catheterization, congenital heart disease and the measurement of blood flow in the heart. He pioneered studies of the role of nitric oxide in the vascular system, work that eventually won the Nobel Prize for three other researchers.

He ultimately published more than 500 research articles. He also published more than 300 musical scores, including a two-hour "Missa," and five books of fiction. His musical manuscripts are housed in the Bing collection at the Doheny Library at the University of Southern California.

"Richard left an indelible mark on cardiology," Dr. Arnold M.Katz of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine wrote recently. "He "was a 'universal' man who made enormous and diverse contributions to our understanding of science and art."

Richard John Bing was born Oct. 12, 1909, in Nuremburg, Germany. He received medical degrees from the University of Munich in 1934 and the University of Bern in Switzerland in 1935, and joined the Carlsberg Biological Institute in Copenhagen. There he was assigned to aid the organ research of Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel of Columbia University and aviator Charles Lindbergh. Later the Americans helped Bing to obtain a fellowship to Columbia, where he married Mary Whipple, who died in 1991 after 52 years of marriage.

Bing joined the U.S. Army in 1943 and served in the chemical warfare corps in Maryland and Germany, rising to lieutenant colonel. After the war, he established a cardiac catheterization lab at Johns Hopkins University. With Dr. Helen Taussig, he discovered a malformation in which the arteries of the heart are transposed. - Los Angeles Times