Gilbert Ling
Gilbert Ning Ling (December 26, 1919 – November 10, 2019) was a Chinese-born American cell physiologist, biochemist and scientific investigator. In 1944, Ling won the biology slot of the sixth Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, a nationwide competitive examination that allowed Chinese science and engineering students full scholarship to study in a United States university. In 1947 he co-developed the Gerard-Graham-Ling microelectrode, a device that allows scientists to more accurately measure the electrical potentials of living cells. In 1962 he proposed the Association induction hypothesis, which claims to be unifying, general theory of the living cell, and is an alternative and controversial hypothesis to the membrane and steady-state membrane pump theories, and three years later added the Polarized-Oriented Multilayer (PM or POM) theory of cell water. Ling carried out scientific experiments that attempted to disprove the accepted view of the cell as a membrane containing a number of pumps such as the sodium potassium pump and the calcium pump and channels that engage in active transport. He died in November 2019, one month short of turning 100. Early life and education Ling was born in December 1919, in Nanking, China. He grew up in Beijing and entered the National Central University (Nanking University) in Chungking as a student of animal husbandry. After two years, he transferred to the biology department and received a Biology B.Sc. degree, minoring in physics and chemistry in 1943. In 1944, having done graduate work in Biochemistry at the National Southwestern Associated University (National Tsing Hua University) in Kunming, Ling won the sixth Boxer Indemnity Scholarship. In early 1946 he began his graduate study in the department of physiology at the University of Chicago under Professor Ralph W. Gerard. In 1948 he completed his Ph.D on the effects of metabolism, temperature and other factors on the membrane potential of single frog muscle fibers which was published in Dec 1949 in a series of 4 papers in the Journal of Cellular and Comparative Physiology, Volume 34, Issue 3. He spent two more years under Prof. Gerard as a Seymour Coman Postdoctoral Fellow. Academic career In 1944, Ling won the only Biology slot of the sixth nationwide Boxer Indemnity Fellowship, to study physiology in the United States, which he took up in January 1946. From 1950 to 1953 Ling worked as an instructor at the medical school of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. His research and experiments led him to the conclusion that the mainstream membrane pump theory of the living cell was not correct. This early embryonic version of the Association induction hypothesis was called Ling's Fixed Charge Hypothesis (LFCH). From 1953 to 1957 he continued full-time research at the Neuropsychiatric institute at the University of Illinois Medical School in Chicago. Beginning as an assistant professor, he was promoted two years later to (tenured) associate professorship. In 1957, he accepted the position of senior research scientist at the basic research department of the newly founded Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute. In 1962 his first book entitled "A Physical Theory