Poiseuille Gold Medal Award ceremony. Presentation address.

Mr. Chairman, Members of our Society and of this Congress, Ladies and Gentlemen It is a great privilege and gives me pleasure as the last recipient of the Poiseuille Gold Medal Award to give you a brief account of the scientific activities and contributions of the person whom The International Society of Biorheology has chosen to honor at this our Congress at The Weizmann Institute of Science here in Rehovot, Israel. Syoten Oka of Tokyo, Japan, was born in that city sixty-seven years ago. In 1930 he received his Bachelor of Science degree in physics at the University of Tokyo. In 1934 he was married to Noriko Teshima, a most charming lady, who, to our great regret, could not make the journey with him. In 1938 he received his Ph.D. in physics at Osaka University where he was an assistant professor and then until 1939 an associate professor. For the next twenty years, he belonged to the Kobayasi Institute of Physical Research, where, in 1946, he became its Chief Research Member. In 1959 he became Professor of Physics at Tokyo Metropolitan University, a position he kept until his retirement in 1971. He was then Professor of Physics at Keio University School of Medicine until 1973. Since that time, he has been Visiting Professor at Kyorin University School of Medicine in Tokyo, where he resides. Last year, he was chosen as Director of the National Cardiovascular Research Institute of Japan. He will assume this post after the completion of this institute, now being built in Osaka. Professor Oka a member of many scientific societies in Japan and elsewhere. He has played and continues to play in Japan a leading role in the organizational and intellectual activities of the physical and medical sciences. From 1952 to 1967 he was Vice-President of the Society of Polymer Science, of which he is an Honorary Member. From 1958 to the present time, he has acted as Chief Editor of "The Reports on Progress in Polymer Physics in Japan". Since 1962, when Biorheology, an International Journal first appeared, Syoten Oka has been one of its Editors. He has been also one of the Vice-Presidents of our Society since its beginning, first, from 1966 to 1969, when it was the International Society of Hemorheology and thereafter, when it became the International Society of Biorheology. Syoten Oka's scientific attainments in our science of biorheology are known to anyone who is actively engaged in biorheological studies or otherwise interested in them. These studies in theoretical biorheology concern the flow of blood in small tubes and capillaries, the flow of a viscous fluid through a tapered tube, principles of rheometry, flow behavior of non-Newtonian fluids and other fields of hemorheology. He has made seventy contributions to our science,* most of which represent original work. They first appeared in 1960 and then became more and more his main scientific interest. However, we would not have a complete picture of the immensity of his scientific productivity, the diversity of his interests, and the depth of his insights, if we were uninformed about his prominence in many other areas of physics, in which he is considered a master. I must confess that I was quite unaware of the extent and scope in his productivity until I received recently on twelve printed pages a record of his publications, which amounted to nearly 300. Besides biorheology, his pioneering studies have concerned the following areas: electrolytes; physics of polar liquid and gases; physics of colloids; fluid mechanics; polymer physics; rheology; physics of dielectrics; biopolymers; biophysics; heat conduction; and powder and disperse systems. Among these pUblications, he was a contributor to more than 40 books, some of which deal with biorheoJogy. This year, his book, entitled Rheology-Biorheology was published in Tokyo [1]. It is in Japanese, and I hope that this book of 492 pages will be published