AWARDEE OF LIFE SCIENCES PRIZE

TANG PEISONG

Abstract

Professor Tang Peisong (P.S.Tang), a plant physiologist,is one of the esteemed  co-founders of the modern Chinese Plant Physiology. He was born on November 12, 1903 in Xishui, Hubei Province and received his earlie education at Tsing Hua College (from 1917 to 1925). He remained at the college until graduation in 1925. Then he went to the University of Minnesota and graduated there with an B.A. degree magnacum laude in 1928. After graduation, upon the recommendation of his  major Minnesota adviser and also because of the then academic reputations, he went to Johns Hopkins and studied with the renowned physiologist Burton E. Livingston. He had been conferred the Ph. D. degree there in 1930. Then, he spent three months of summer vacation in the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, supported by a special research grant, before the following transfer to the Laboratory of General Physiology, Harvard University. The serene experience at Harvard, where he productively sent out the publications on now well－documented cytochrome oxidase and relations between oxygen tension and consumption in cells and tissues, has been left in his mind even after fifty years of the domestic work. In 1933, he accepted an invitation from Wuhan University and returned to the then devastatingly conflicting homeland of China and ever since, he has begun his “devious trail of a roaming plant physiologist”. Academically, he has long been involved in the systematic studies of the plant physiology and biochemisty and made a series of great academic achievements frequently valued at home and abroad. In his earlier work, he had sucessfully proved the existence of the respiratory enzyme (i.e. cytochrome oxidase) in plants and proposed that there exist various but interconnected respiratory metabolic path ways and electron transfers in the same plant. He had firstly put forward the widely accepted concept of“control of respiration (by enzyme reactions) and respiratory control (of physiological activities) in the living and intact tissues”in 1950s and experimentally proved the existence of carbonic anhydrase in plants for the first time. He and Prof. J. S. Wang (also a senior Chinese Academician) thermodynamically illustrated the movement mechanisms of the intercellular water content in 1940s and which has been finally acclaimed and refered to as a forerunning and creative“Tang－Wang theory”of the cellular water potential by authentic international experts. The idea in his book“Green Thraldum”about the multi－level utilization of the solar energe in order to respond to the long－term energe requirements by  Human society had been enthusiasticaly quoted by other researchers of the time.
He and his colleagues and students have already published about 200 scientific research papers so far. He has received many times the National and the Academy Awards for Sciences, which is undoubtedly a highly appraising for his outstanding coutributions to the Chinese and the world plant physiology research progress.