Eiichi Fukada 1995 Recipient of the Jean-Leonard-Marie Poiseuille Award Outstanding and Creative Work in Electro-Biorheology and Hemorheology

Eiichi Fukada was awarded the Poiseuille Medal during 9th International Congress of Biorheology. His Poiseuille Lecture was entitled "Piezoelectricity of Biopolymers". E. Fukada started to study the piezoelectric effect of wood and of bone in the 1950's, and first discovered the piezoelectricity of bone in 1957. This study triggered the succeeding abundant research on the stress-generated electricity in bone and other tissues such as cartilage. skin and teeth. His work disclosed that mechanical strain and electrical poralization are combined together in the living bone and thus laid a foundation for succeeding work on the electrical stimulation of repair and growth of bone and other tissues. He continuously expanded his work on piezoelectricity to a large number of biopolymers, including proteins such as collagen and keratin, polysaccharides such as cellulose and amylose, and polynucleotides. He established that piezoelectricity is a general property of biopolymers which intrinsically originates from their molecular structure and crystallinity. He created a new area of knowledge for biopolymers, which has been entirely unknown before his pioneering and original research. Also, E. Fukada's research on biorheology dates back to early 1960's., when he constructed several new instruments for rheological measurements. He first succeeded the quantitative measurement of the dynamic viscoelasticity of blood during time course of clotting. The mechanisms of blood clotting were extensively investigated in detail.