Richard Bing.

摘要

While inserting a catheter into a patient's right atrium at Johns Hopkins University in the late 1940s, Richard Bing accidentally entered the coronary sinus instead of the right ventricle. Hewasn'tthefirst to make the mistake but he was the first to recognise that sampling the dark blood from the coronary sinus, which carries deoxygenated blood to the heart's right atrium, and comparing it with blood drawn from the systemic circulation provided a means to measure the heart's metabolism. The "chance observation", as Bing later called it, launched the field of cardiac metabolism, linking basic science to human disease. "To the clinicians, he seemed too basic science minded. To the basic scientists, he was too clinical", says Tsung O Cheng, a professor of medicine at George Washington University. But that was his greatest strength, adds Cheng: "He was able to translate basic science into the clinical field."