A world-renowned virologist
Gueh-Djen (Edith) Hsiung, an internationally recognized virologist and professor emeritus of laboratory medicine, died of cancer on Aug. 20 at Connecticut Hospice in Branford. She was 87.
A pioneer in the field of diagnostic virology, Hsiung was known for the technique she invented to detect and characterize viruses. She authored a landmark textbook, established laboratories and trained generations of new professionals in the field, even into her early 80s.
Hsiung was also known for her development of animal models to study the pathogenesis and treatment of viral infections.
According to her colleague William H. Prusoff, professor emeritus and senior research scientist in pharmacology, Hsiung was one of an elite group of "medical detectives" who became expert in the inner workings of microbes during the latter half of the 20th century.
"Her great strength was her ability to determine which virus a particular patient might have," says Prusoff, who co-discovered the AIDS drug d4T. "She also wrote the definitive textbook on the evaluation of viral infections."
Born on Sept. 16, 1918, in Hupei, China, Hsiung graduated with a degree in biology from Ginling College in Chengdu, China. Her opportunity to attend medical school was lost, however, when Peking Union Medical College closed during World War II. Instead, Hsiung secured a job testing bacterial and viral vaccines for use in animals at the Epizootic Prevention Bureau of the Ministry of Public Health in Lanzhou, China. "From this early experience, Dr. Hsiung learned to be productive even in times of limited resources, a trait that served her well," wrote Dr. Marie Landry, her colleague in the Department of Laboratory Medicine, in a remembrance of her co-worker. "When charged with the transport of a stock virus for rinderpest vaccine without the benefit of refrigeration or dry ice, Hsiung injected the vaccine into a goat and then traveled to her destination for 27 days by truck, with the goat at her side."
Hsiung came to the United States after the war and obtained her Ph.D. in microbiology from Michigan State University in 1951. At that time, she underwent surgery to fuse a congenitally dislocated hip, spending nine months in a total body cast. To pay her medical expenses, Hsiung worked for the next two years at the Wene Poultry Laboratory in New Jersey, where she developed the first vaccine for infectious bronchitis virus in chickens.
Since her original interest was in medicine, Hsiung applied for admission to the Yale medical school, but was told that she was too old. Instead, she was offered a postdoctoral fellowship in 1953, working under Dr. Joseph Melnick on poliovirus and related enteroviruses. She joined the faculty the next year, and aside from a two-year stint at New York University, spent her entire career at Yale.
Hsiung produced more than 200 scientific publications. She was the first to describe the use of plaque morphology and a spectrum of cell cultures for recognition and characterization of the polio-virus, Coxsackie virus and echoviruses. She discovered and characterized viral infections in guinea pigs that facilitated studies of disease pathogenesis and treatment in humans. Her demonstration of transplacental transmission of cytomegalovirus (CMV) in the guinea pig correlated with congenital CMV in humans and provided an important model for this infection.
Hsiung also helped bridge the gap between basic research and clinical medicine. She became the first director of the Diagnostic Virology Laboratory at Grace-New Haven Hospital in 1960, wrote the textbook "Diagnostic Virology" that became a standard, and taught an intensive course titled "Experimental and Diagnostic Methods in Virology" for decades in the United States, China and Taiwan, thus training countless professionals in the field. In 1984, she established the National Virology Reference Laboratory at the Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center in West Haven, Connecticut, to serve VA hospitals nationwide, and became its first director. From 1992 to 1998, Hsiung traveled annually to the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan to help establish a model virology laboratory in its Department of Pathology. This laboratory has since played an important role in diagnosing serious viral infections in the region, such as SARS and avian influenza. This month, a new Virology Contract Laboratory named in honor of Hsiung opens at the National Health Research Institute at the Taiwanese university.
Hsiung received a number of other honors, including the Becton-Dickinson Award in Clinical Microbiology from the American Society for Microbiology, the Wellcome Diagnostic Award from the Pan American Group for Rapid Viral Diagnosis and an honorary degree from Michigan State University. In 1989, friends and colleagues established the G.D. Hsiung, Ph.D., Student Research Fellowship Fund. The Pan American Society for Clinical Virology gives an award each year in her honor.
Hsiung is survived by her niece, Zhi Wang of Kuerle in Xinjiang Province, China; her grandnieces Zhe Zhao of Branford, Connecticut, and Wei Zhao of Kuerle; her great-grandnephew Newton Ni; and great-grandnieces Marion Ni and Diana Ni, all of Branford. A memorial service will take place at Yale later this year.
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Gueh-Djen (Edith) Hsiung, a world-renowned virologist
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