Cardiac researcher and author Bing dies at 101

Published 4:00 am Saturday, November 13, 2010

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 had celebrated his 101st birthday a month earlier and had been suffering from heart disease.

One of the last surviving Jewish scientists who fled Nazi Germany to escape persecution, 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 published more than 500 research articles. But 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 John Bing was born Oct. 12, 1909, in Nuremburg, Germany. He took piano lessons as a child and studied piano in a master class at the conservatory in the Nuremburg Gymnasium, but the major focus of his efforts was composition. He concluded, he later wrote, that a more sustainable career could be achieved in medicine.