Laudatio for Harry Goldsmith.

Abstract

Professor Harry Goldsmith was born May 11, 1928, in Nurnberg, Germany. His marvelous journey in science started with his undergraduate study at Oxford University, where he received B.A. (Honours) in Chemistry and B.Sc. in Physical Chemistry in 1950 and 1951, respectively. After serving as a Technical Officer at Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd. in Manchester, UK, for six years, and as a Defence Research Board Fellow at Royal Military College of Canada for one year, Harry began his Ph.D. study in Chemistry at McGill University, Montreal, in 1958. Under the advisorship of the late Dr. Stanley G. Mason of the Pulp and Paper Research Institute, Harry completed his outstanding thesis on The Microrheology of Suspensions in 1961. After three years of postdoctoral training in the Department of Chemistry at McGill University, Harry was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Experimental Medicine in 1964 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1969. In 1972, he became Full Professor in the Division of Experimental Medicine in the Department of Medicine at McGill, and he was Director of the Division from 1976 to 1995. In addition to his stellar research contributions, Harry played a major leadership role in the education of graduate students and the administration of the Division. Harry Goldsmith made outstanding contributions to the theory and application of rheology. He established the fundamental principle of the rheological behavior of particles in suspension by a combination of ingenious experiments and elegant analysis. The 176-page Chapter on “The Microrheology of Dispersions” by Harry Goldsmith and Stanley Mason in F.R. Eirich’s book in 1967 [1] is a Classic. This marvelous chapter established the fundamental principles of particle motion in laminar and non-uniform flows, with applications to suspension viscosity and blood rheology in large and small vessels, covering the entire field of microrheology, including blood rheology. Having started to work on blood rheology only a few years before, I found this Chapter to be a treasure and read it many times. It gave me tremendous inspiration and had great influence throughout the years on my studies on biorheology. Harry Goldsmith is not only a superb scientist, but also an ingenious designer of instruments for his sophisticated research. For example, his traveling microscopy system allowed the tracking of cells flowing in a tube by the controlled motion of the tube with a velocity that is equal and opposite to that of the cell, thus keeping the cell always in the field of observation for dynamic cinematographic filming and quantitative analysis. He has performed experiments on particles, red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, and other types of cells. He has the unique capability to apply elegant hydrodynamic theory to analyze such quantitative experiments on individual or groups of cells in terms of their translation, rotation, collision, deformation, adhesion, and aggregation/disaggregation, thus providing novel insights on a whole range of microrheological dynamics at the cellular levels. He also deduced the molecular level force (in microdynes) of antibody–antigen bonding between two cells in a doublet.