April 18, 2002
First San-pin Wang endowed lecture planned May 2
The School of Public Health and Community Medicine’s Department of Pathobiology will host the first San-pin Wang Endowed Lecture in early May. The professorship honors Dr. San-pin Wang, who was affiliated with the UW for 37 years before his death in 2001.
Dr. Pakka Saikku, who worked with Wang in the 1980s at the UW and is now at Oulu University in Finland, will give the first lecture. He speaks on “Recent Observations on Chlamydia Pneumoniae in Atherosclerosis” at 4 p.m., Thursday, May 2, in room T-733 of the Health Sciences Building. The lecture is open to everyone.
Saikku, whose work at the UW in the 1980s was critical to the discovery of a then-new human chlamydial isolate that causes respiratory infection, later found a link betweeen antibodies to that organism (Chlamydia pneumoniae) and atherosclerosis, commonly called hardening of the arteries. The possible role of this infection, and of other causes of inflammation, are now being investigated in many labs around the world.
Saikku’s discoveries required a serologic technique known as the micro-immunoflourescent test, which was developed by Wang and taught to Saikku.
Wang was a close associate of Drs. J. Thomas Grayston, Cho-chou Kuo and Lee Ann Campbell, who worked as a team on chlamydial research for many years in the Department of Pathobiology.
Wang devoted almost his entire scientifc careeer to research on different strains of chlamydia, notoriously difficult organisms to study. The micro-immunofluorescent test he developed was important in identifying Chlamydia trachomatis as one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases and discovering Chlamydia pneumoniae as an important respiratory pathogen.
Wang came to the UW in 1964 and retired in 1991 as professor emeritus of pathobiology. He was born in Taiwan and educated in Japan, receiving his M.D. at Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo. He also earned a master’s degree in public health from the University of Michigan and was a former medical officer in the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit in Taipei, Taiwan.
