Gilbert Ling –Timeline of His Life and Career

Gilbert Ning Ling (December 26, 1919 — November 10, 2019) was a Chinese-born American cell physiologist, biochemist and scientific investigator.

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.

Gilbert 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.

• 1919

  Gilbert Ling is born on December 26, 1919 in Nanjing, Republic of China. To (Mother) and (Father).

• 19__

  Ling enters the National Central University (Nanking University) in Chungking as a student of animal husbandry. After two years, he transferrs to the biology department.

• 1943

  Ling receives a Biology B.Sc. degree, minoring in physics and chemistry.

• 1944

  Having done graduate work in Biochemistry at the National Southwestern Associated University (National Tsing Hua University) in Kunming, Ling wins the sixth Boxer Indemnity Scholarship

• 1946

  Ling begins his graduate studies in the Department of Physiology at the University of Chicago under Professor Ralph W. Gerard

• 1948

  Ling completes his Ph.D on the effects of metabolism, temperature and other factors on the membrane potential of single frog muscle fibers.

• 1949

  Ling publishes a series of 4 papers in the Journal of Cellular and Comparative Physiology, Volume 34, Issue 3. He spends two more years under Prof. Gerard as a Seymour Coman Postdoctoral Fellow.

• 1950—1953

  Ling works 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).

• 1953-1957

  Ling continues 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 Professor-ship.

• 1957

  Ling is accepts the position of Senior Research Scientist at the Basic Research Department of the newly founded Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute.

• 1962

  

  Ling´s first book entitled "A Physical Theory of the Living State: the Association-Induction Hypothesis." is published. At this time Ling became director of a research laboratory at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia.