Happy 100th birthday to Dr. Richard John Bing

Dr. Richard John Bing (Fig. 1) will be 100 years old on October 12, 2009. There are very few physicians, to my knowledge, who remain very active and extraordinarily productive at 100 years of age. Witness the article Dr. Bing wrote on surgery of the young heart and about Drs. William Glenn and Francis Fontan (Fig. 2) that was published earlier this year [1]. There are even fewer physicianswho are asmultitalented as Dr. Bing who is still productive at 100 years of age as a physician, scientist, musician, composer and author of medical and non-medical books, book chapters and articles. Indeed, Dr. Bing is a genius [2]. I will discuss these attributes in more details later on. I do not intend to write a biography on him, because there have been quite a few excellent ones already published [2–4]. What I intend to do in the following few pages is to describe briefly Dr. Bing's achievements — listed in alphabetical order — from my personal knowledge, recollection and research over the years so that your readers may get a glimpse of what this “Renaissance man” [3,4] is really like.