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Professor Autar Singh Paintal, doyen in the field of cardiorespiratory sensory physiology died on December 21,2004. He was born on September 24,1925, in the ruby mining town of Mogok in Myanmar, erstwhile Burma. His father Dr. Man Singh was a physician in the British Medical Services. He completed his matriculation from Lahore, and did his intermediate examination of the Panjab University from Forman Christian College. He subsequently obtained admission at King George's Medical College (KGMC), Lucknow in 1943. His stay at the Medical College (1943-1948) was marked by distinction and awards, including the coveted HEWITT Gold Medal. He did his M.D. in Physiology in 1950 from KGMC, Lucknow (now King George Medical University).
After being appointed as a lecturer in the Physiology Department of KGMC, he proceeded to work for his Ph.D degree (1952) with Prof. David Whitteridge in the Physiology Department of the Medical School in Edinburgh on a Rockefeller Fellowship. While in UK, he developed two innovative techniques in electrophysiology, which revolutionized studies on sensory physiology. The first one involved usage of liquid paraffin for immersing nerves while dissecting and recording from them. The second one was injection of chemicals into the circulation to discover 'silent' sensory visceral receptors. For his contributions, he was elected to the British Physiological Society in 1953.
After obtaining his Ph.D, he returned to India to work as a Technical Officer in the Defence Laboratories in Kanpur before taking up the post of Assistant Director at Vallabhbhai Patel Chest Institute, Delhi where he made several discoveries for which he is famous globally. From 1956-1958, he was invited as Visiting Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, USA, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA and University of Goettingen, Germany. He was then offered the position of Professor of Physiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi where he spent six years (1958-1964). It...