GUEH-DJEN (EDITH) HSIUNG, PHD
1918-2006

Dr. Gueh-Djen (Edith) Hsiung, Ph.D. died on Sunday, August 20, 2006 at Connecticut Hospice after a long illness with cancer. Dr. Hsiung was Professor Emeritus of Laboratory Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine and a world-renowned virologist and teacher. She was 87.

She was born on September 16, 1918 in Hupei, China and graduated from Ginling College in Chengdu, China in 1942, where she majored in premedical studies and biology. Her opportunity to attend medical school was lost, however, when Peking Union Medical College closed during World War II. Instead, after graduation she 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. When charged with the transport of a stock virus for rinderpest vaccine without the benefit of refrigeration or dry ice, Dr. Hsiung injected the vaccine virus into a goat and then traveled to her destination for 27 days by truck, with the goat at her side.

After the war, she came to the United States and obtained her Ph.D. in Microbiology from Michigan State University in 1951. At that time, she also underwent day-long surgery to fuse a congenitally dislocated hip, spending nine months in a total body cast. In order to pay her medical expenses, she 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 medicine, she applied for admission to Yale University School of Medicine, but was told she was too old. Instead she was offered a postdoctoral fellowship, which paid a much needed stipend. Thus, in 1953, she came to Yale University School of Medicine where she first worked under Dr. Joseph Melnick (discoverer of coxsackie B and echoviruses) on poliovirus and related enteroviruses. She joined the faculty the next year and, aside from a two-year sojourn at New York University, spent her entire professional career at Yale.

Her research spanned five decades, and produced more than 240 scientific publications. She was the first to describe the use of plaque morphology and a spectrum of cell cultures for recognition and characterization of polio, coxsackie, and echoviruses, and she recognized the importance of endogenous viruses in cell cultures derived from a variety of animal species. She discovered and characterized viral infections in guinea pigs that facilitated studies of disease pathogenesis and treatment in humans. For example, 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. In the process, she trained numerous post-doctoral fellows who came to her laboratory from around the world.

Dr. Hsiung was a passionate spokesperson for accurate viral diagnosis and a pioneer in founding modern diagnostic virology. She became the first Director of the Diagnostic Virology Laboratory at Yale New Haven Hospital in 1960, wrote the textbook "Diagnostic Virology" that became a standard in the field, and gave an intensive course entitled "Experimental and Diagnostic Methods of Virology" every 1-2 years for decades in the U.S., China and Taiwan, thus training countless professionals in the field. In 1967, she became Chief of the Virology Research and Diagnostic Laboratories at the West Haven VA Hospital and Professor of Laboratory Medicine at Yale. In 1984, she established the National Virology Reference Laboratory at the West Haven VA to serve VA hospitals nationwide, and became its first Director. From 1992 to 1998, Dr. Hsiung traveled annually to the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan to help establish a model virology laboratory in the Department of Pathology. This laboratory has subsequently played an important role in diagnosing serious viral infections in the region, such as SARS and avian influenza. In September 2006, a new Virology Contract Laboratory named in honor of Dr. Hsiung will open at the National Health Research Institute at Chen Kung University.

Dr. Hsiung received many awards and honors, including the Becton-Dickinson Award in Clinical Microbiology from the American Society for Microbiology, and the Wellcome Diagnostic Award from the Pan American Group for Rapid Viral Diagnosis (the previous name of the Pan American Society for Clinical Virology). In 1989, she received an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from Michigan State University.

Dr. Hsiung was well known for her persistence and determination, her infectious enthusiasm for every "discovery" no matter how small, and her skill in encouraging her many protŽgŽs. Her many friends, colleagues and trainees greatly appreciated her good cheer, boundless energy, social grace, and generosity. Although she was never known to take a vacation, the wonderful parties she gave at her home in Branford remain legendary.

Dr. Hsiung is survived by her niece, Zhi Wang of China, grand nieces, Zhe Zhao of Branford, CT and Wei Zhao of China, great grand nephew Newton Ni, and great grand nieces Marion Ni and Diana Ni.