JIANG Lijin (1919-2008), a renowned photobiochemist, died in Beijing at the age of 89.
Graduated from the Department of Chemical Engineering, Furen University, in 1944, Jiang received her PhD from Minnesota University in 1951. She conducted postdoc research at University of Kansas and MIT, respectively. She joined CAS in 1956 and became a research professor of the former CAS Institute of Photographic Chemistry in 1978. She was elected a CAS Member in 1980.
Prof. Jiang was engaged in the studies of chemistry of natural products for pharmaceutical application, organic analysis, structural identification of organic compounds and elementary organic chemistry. At the end of the 1970s, she initiated research into photobiology in China. In the 1980s, right after the first discovery and application of hypocrellins clinically as a phototherapeutic agent for the treatment of certain skin diseases and cancers, she and her colleagues kept on the studies of the mechanism of phototherapeutic effects of hypocrellins. She made progress on the studies of the structures and light energy transfers among the phycobiliproteins of marine algae. She published a number of monographs such as "Chemistry and Phototherapeutic Mechanism of Hypocrellins which won her a second class prize of the Natural Science Award of CAS in 1990 and other publications on phycobiliproteins for which she was conferred another second class prize of the Natural Science Award of CAS in 1993.
