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"RENAISSANCE" DOCTOR TAKES UP PEN
Renowned pioneer, 95, praised for creations
By Kimm Groshong, Star News Staff Writer
PASADENA -- Richard Bing has led a life that seems right out of a blockbuster movie.
A physician, researcher and world-renowned heart specialist, Bing fled Europe and the Nazis before World War II with the help of aviator Charles Lindbergh.
Once in the United States, he worked diligently in cardiology, attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and eventually achieved what one colleague called "godlike status" in his field.
At the same time, Bing has pursued his love of composing classical music, hearing his compositions performed throughout Europe and the United States. He has published a book of short stories, and now he's hammering away at a novel.
At 95, the La Canada Flintridge resident still works in his office at the Huntington Medical Research Institutes every day, if not necessarily 8 to 5. But to him, even that is slowing down. He likes to joke that he took "early retirement' at the age of 93.
"He's a true Renaissance man," said Robert Goldweber, the residency and associate director of the emergency department at Huntington Hospital. "He will always be remembered as one of the great contributors to our society."
A voice in the wilderness K-Heiner Vogelbach, the director of cardiology at Methodist Hospital, said Bing is "definitely one of the pioneers of modern cardiology."
But while Bing's life is characterized by success, he has also experienced his share of frustration. With some 400 scientific publications, two books and more than 300 musical scores under his belt, Bing admits that he was addicted to his work for most of his life. Today, he finds himself seeking a new, perhaps broader, audience through creative writing.
It's a move that makes sense in the light of recent developments that he says have embittered him.
Long before the studies came out that caused pharmaceutical giant Merck to pull one of its big moneymakers, Vioxx, and Pfizer to stop promotional ads for Celebrex, Bing and his colleagues published research explaining the scientific basis for that class of drugs' potential negative cardiovascular effects.
"I was a voice in the wilderness ... but my voice has been without echo," he said. "When you work on something so long, you like to let people know."
The first of Bing's studies on COX-2 inhibitors, the painkiller class to which Vioxx and Celebrex belong, was received by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in 2001 and was published in 2002. Bing followed that study with several others on the same subject. But all fell on deaf ears.
Bing says results that scientists obtain in research laboratories are "often overlooked because of ignorance and of prejudice against laboratory data" in favor of clinical studies where human patients are monitored.
William Opel, HMRI's executive director, said Bing's work "not only provides some balance and caution to the creative enthusiasm that surrounded these COX-2 inhibitors but in many ways it also points the way for new kinds of drugs that may be even better than the ones that are troubled."
The work Bing is perhaps best known for and which he cites as his most important was his elucidation of the heart's metabolic processes. He figured out which and how much of the various nutrients in the body the heart uses to function normally and how abnormalities can lead to disease. He did most of that pioneering work in the 1940s and '50s at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Alabama in Birmingham.
A famous duo's encounter Born in Nurnberg, Bavaria in 1909, Bing attended master classes in piano at the conservatory in Nurnberg gymnasium. Choosing medicine over music for a career, he earned medical degrees from the universities of Munich and Bern.
While working in a lab in Denmark in 1935, Bing took advantage of one of the first important audiences he ever entertained. Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel and world-famous pilot Charles Lindbergh were attending a meeting there to show off a pump they had designed that was capable of artificially sustaining organs. Bing used his ability to speak Danish, German and English to become the famous duo's helper.
Carrel and Lindbergh worked with the Rockefeller Institute of New York to secure a fellowship for Bing. That one-year opportunity turned into a lifetime of science in America.
"I wanted to go to America more than anything," Bing said. "I had no future in Nazi Germany."
As soon as the second world war began, Bing wanted to volunteer in the medical corps of the U.S. Army. He wasn't able to enlist until 1943 because of medical licensing technicalities. But by the end of the war, Bing had served in the chemical warfare corps and in Germany and had been promoted to lieutenant colonel.
After the war, he went to work at Johns Hopkins studying congenital heart disease and the then-infant field of heart catheterization where he again made a series of discoveries.
From Johns Hopkins and Alabama, Bing went to Washington University and the Veterans Administration Hospital in St. Louis and then to Wayne State University in Detroit. He took a job with the Huntington Memorial Hospital and Research Institutes in 1969.
As director of clinical and experimental cardiology, he also established the residency program in internal medicine for the hospital. He then became a professor emeritus at USC and a visiting associate at Caltech.
One of the residents Bing trained at Huntington, John Easthope, who is now Bing's cardiologist at Huntington Hospital, remembered Bing as an "excellent teacher,' always making time to help and teach the interns and residents at the hospital.
For his efforts, Bing has been awarded honorary degrees from the University of Bologna, Dusseldorf and Wurzburg, as well as Johns Hopkins. He is also a fellow of the International Academy of Cardiovascular Sciences and the International Society for Heart Research gives out the Richard Bing Award for the Best Young Investigator in the Field of Heart Research.
But Bing remains a "humble gentleman," Goldweber said.
Speaking of the parallels he sees between Albert Einstein and Bing, Vogelbach said, "Despite their eminence, they were the most modest people on a personal basis."
Very close indeed Perhaps one reason Bing has never been selected for a Nobel Prize is the fact that "he was not involved in one major breakthrough, but a multitude of interesting things," Vogelbach said.
"I was close, but no cigar," Bing said. "I didn't get my ticket to Stockholm."
The prize in 1998 went to three researchers who discovered the role nitric oxide plays in the cardiovascular system.
Bing had done early work trying to determine which chemical was responsible for the regulation of the heart that the prize-winning researchers observed. He collected samples of the chemical, analyzed it and even presented the results in Oxford. But, in the end, he failed to make the final connection that would have clarified what the chemical was and the role it plays in regulating the heart's vessels.
Also, he never found the proper audience for his findings to encourage him to continue pursuing the research, so he dropped it.
"If I had only pursued it," Bing said, allowing his sentence to trail off.
But Bing doesn't linger in discussions on what was lacking in his life. He was married to his late wife, Mary Whipple, for 52 years and had four children with her. He also cites performances in Pasadena and Vienna of his two-hour liturgical piece, the "Missa," in 1993 as highlights in his life.
The composition took him about two years to write. He said he wrote it night and day and even dreamed of it. "It was a time of utter happiness," he said.
He now turns to his new hobby, creative writing, to supply much of that happiness. The preface of his recently published book "Fifteen Lives and a Cat's Story" offers some insight into Bing's musings in old age. He writes, "only by transference does the past become tolerable, while the future remains an unknown adversary.'
"I've had a crazy life," he said. "I want to be creative as long as I can."
-- Kimm Groshong can be reached at (626) 578-6300, Ext. 4451, or by e-mail at kimm.groshong@sgvn.com .