Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of ISOTT (September 27, 2023 Tokyo, Japan): ISOTT—A Meaningful Idea That Is Successful

In the early 1960s, I was working as a traditional chemical engineer studying inanimate objects without the slightest clue of the biological world. At that time, I met Dr Melvin H. Knisely and he encouraged me to use my engineering skills to improve on the Krogh capillary tissue cylinder. I derived a detailed mathematical model and performed a complex computer simulation to achieve that goal. We attended professional meetings on oxygen transport to tissue all over the world, but mainly in Europe, presenting case studies. It became my goal to honour Dr Knisely with a meeting on oxygen transport to tissue at Clemson University in South Carolina, USA. Melvin’s wife, Verona, convinced me to also have the meeting at the Medical University of South Carolina located in Charleston, since it was meant to honour Dr Knisely’s work with his quartz rod crystal for illumination. He is credited as the first human being to observe the particulate matter in blood flowing in the microcirculation. He was nominated for the Nobel prize four times as a result of his discoveries. When I decided to have part of the meeting at the medical school, I invited Dr Haim Bicher to work with me from there and I focused on Clemson University and the combined meeting structure. As the meeting evolved, we decided it would be a good idea to establish an international society and call it the “International Society on Oxygen Transport to Tissue” (ISOTT). I wrote a paper on the pillars of our young society, “ISOTT from the Beginning: A Tribute to Our Deceased Members (Icons),” and another that shares more detail about its beginnings, “The Founding of ISOTT: The Shamattawa of Engineering Science and Medical Science”. The roots of ISOTT are all the members, new and old, who continue to make valuable contributions to an exceedingly important component of human health. I hope that the society lasts for a long time, continuing to make important contributions to the medical world. It is a society that has been instrumental in bringing together brilliant scientists from the medical, engineering, and natural science fields to work together. It has contributed to the evolution of “bioengineering” as we know it today.