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作者是 ncku.net newsroom
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週四, 31 一月 2008 19:26 |
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周宗隆 - 2007年 傑出校友獎 得獎人
Name: Dr. Laurence C Chow 周宗隆
Year Graduated: 1964, Chemical Engineering 化工系
Address: 20517 Anndyke Way, Germantown, MD 20874
Telephone: 301-540-1198 (H) 301-975-6826 (W)
E-mail:
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Education:
• B.S. Chemical Engineering, Cheng Kung University, 1964
• Ph.D. Physical Chemistry, Georgetown University, 1970
Proud of Being A CKU Alumnus
I am grateful to NCKU-NAA for being selected as a recipient of the “outstanding alumni” award this year. This honor humbles me because a great many CKU alumni have demonstrated extraordinary accomplishments, while my achievements are much limited to a narrow scientific area.
The four years spent at CKU is a short segment of my adult life, but impact from the alma mater remains strong more than four decades later. To me one of the great strengths of CKU was that we had outstanding teachers. Despite the limited resources available in the 1960’s, many teachers were able to introduce new and sometimes complex concepts to us in such a clear way that once understood you’ll never forget (something like you don’t forget how to ride a bike). Several of our teachers were pretty tough too, expecting the students to work hard. As a result, many of us felt that, for the most part, being a graduate student here was no harder than at CKU. An important thing that the teachers taught us was that as a scientist, one should be a good listener/observer while keeping an objective and analytical mind. This philosophy has helped me a great deal in my work later as briefly described below.
After finishing graduate school in late 1969, I joined the Paffenbarger Research Center at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where I work today. My work has focused on the general area known as “biomineralization.” Loosely defined, this field covers processes in living systems that lead to formation or destruction of hard tissues, such as bones and teeth, and those that lead to abnormal calcifications such as in hardening of the artery.
In mid 1980’s, a colleague, WE Brown, and I discovered that certain mixtures of calcium phosphate compounds when mixed with water would form hydroxyapatite, the mineral component of teeth and bones, and become a hardened mass like a cement. Subsequent work conducted with surgeons at Northwestern University showed that when the calcium phosphate paste was placed in a defect in bone, it was gradually replaced by new bone, leading to complete absorption of the cement and a full healing of the defect.
It took about 10 years of additional work before the cements received approval by the FDA in 1996 for repairing cranial and maxilla-facial defects in humans. By then the cements had become a subject of considerable interest, and over the next decade scientists throughout the world continued to make significant improvements in the cements: it can harden in minutes rather than hours, it is stronger than bone, it can be made to be flexible rather than brittle, just to name a few. Today there are more than a dozen such products in clinical use. It is likely that in the foreseeable future the need for bone autograft (taking bone from one part of your body to repair a defect in another part) is totally eliminated through the use of calcium phosphate and other synthetic bone graft materials.
A serendipitous discovery that led to development of a new class of biomedical materials is very much a by-product of scientific research. The invariable goal of scientists is to gain new insights into the unknown, no matter how trivial the subject might seem at the time. Over the last two decades, we have hosted dozens of professors on sabbatical or young postdoctoral scientists as a way to learn from each other. We hope to contribute to the cumulative knowledge base that would improve the quality of our lives. I am glad to be in this line of work and hope to continue the endeavor for years to come.
周宗隆
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