Alexander Silberberg 1980 Recipient of the Jean-Leonard-Marie Poiseuille Award Outstanding Contributions to Theoritical and Experimental Biorheology

Alexander Silberberg was awarded the Poiseuille Medal during the Fourth International Congress of Biorheology. His Poiseuille Lecture was entitled "The Mechanics and Thermodynamics of Separation Flow Through Porous, Molecularity Disperse, Solid Media". A. Silberberg has brought to biorheology a broad background in physical and polymer chemistry which he has employed in trying to understand the molecular basis for the rheological behaviour of various biological systems. He explored the relationship of the molecular structure of the mucus to its flow properties. In his studies of blood-to-lymph transport of various molecular species. He has given careful consideration to both physical and chemical makeup of the interstitial space through which these materials move. He has continued his studies on polymeric entanglement and interaction in connective tissue and its relationship to interstitial transport. Silberberg's contributions to biorheoogy have shown the great importance of a multidisciplinary and multi-pronged attack on the complicated problems of deformation and flow in biological systems : the need for accurate determination of the phenomena involved by use of carefully designed experiments; clear analytical formulation of the results; and ultimately an approach to understanding these results by exploring the molecular basis of the phenomena.