His death was confirmed by his son John.
Dr. Bing, who earned his medical degree in Germany but emigrated soon after Hitler rose to power, did groundbreaking research on the physiology of the heart and kidneys for more than half a century.
In the 1950s, his research made it possible to measure blood flow to the heart and determine its mechanical efficiency. In the 1960s, he developed an early version of the PET scan. His work on congenital heart disease led to the identification of a variety of cardiac malformations that surgeons were then able to treat.
When not engaged in medical research, Dr. Bing drew on his early conservatory training in piano and composition, and a close relationship with the composer Carl Orff, to write more than 300 works for chamber ensemble, orchestra and chorus that have been performed around the world. He also wrote several published works of fiction.
Dr. Bing first gained prominence at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he, the cardiac surgeon Alfred Blalock and the cardiologist Helen B. Taussig established the first cardiac catheterization laboratory dedicated to congenital heart disease.
There, Dr. Bing developed a technique that made it possible to measure the mechanical efficiency of the heart by inserting a catheter into a vein in the arm and from there into the main blood vessel that carries deoxygenated blood away from the heart muscle.
“It opened a whole new era for understanding how the heart functions as a pump and what goes wrong when it fails to pump efficiently,” said Dr. Heinrich Taegtmeyer, a professor of medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. “It also opened a new field, cardiac metabolism, that is still very much alive and well.”
Dr. Bing’s research on congenital heart disease included the identification of Taussig-Bing syndrome, a rare congenital deformation of the heart.
In the 1960s, working with the physicist George W. Clark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and aided by computers from the Ford Motor Company, Dr. Bing developed the use of radioactive tracers to measure cardiac blood flow and produce images of the heart. This laid the foundation for modern PET, or positron emission tomography, scanning, which produces three-dimensional images of bodily functions.
The citation accompanying his honorary doctorate from Johns Hopkins, awarded in 2000, characterized him as “one of the great cardiologists of our time.”
Richard Bing, who used the middle name John in the United States, was born on Oct. 12, 1909, in Nuremberg. His father was a hops merchant. His mother, a professional singer with a specialty in Bach’s cantatas, passed along a keen interest in music. After studying at the Nuremberg Conservatory, he pursued premedical studies in Frankfurt, Vienna, Berlin and Munich. For a time, he wavered between music and medicine.
Seeking advice, he auditioned for the composer Richard Strauss, who was late for a card game and rushed off without offering an opinion. The perplexed Mr. Bing opted for medicine after reading “Arrowsmith,” Sinclair Lewis’s portrait of an idealistic doctor.
He earned a medical degree from the University of Munich in 1934. After he and the rest of his family, which was Jewish, left Germany, he earned a second medical degree from the University of Bern the following year.
While on a fellowship at the Carlsberg Biological Institute in Copenhagen, he collaborated with the surgeon Alexis Carrel, a Nobel laureate for his work on organ transplants, and the aviator Charles Lindbergh.
The two men were visiting the institute to demonstrate an experimental pump to supply nutrient fluid to organs so they could survive outside the body during surgery, and they arranged for Dr. Bing to study perfusion, as the technique was known, at the Rockefeller Institute in New York.
After immigrating to the United States in 1936, he accepted a post in physiology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, where, under Dr. Allen O. Whipple, he conducted research on vasopressor peptides secreted by the kidneys, work that laid the foundation for studying renal hypertension and renal failure caused by crushing injuries.
In 1938 he married Dr. Whipple’s daughter, Mary. She died in 1990. In addition to his son John, of Ewing, N.J., he is survived by another son, William, of Altadena, Calif.; a daughter, Judy Tasker of Thousand Oaks, Calif.; six grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
In 1943, he enlisted as a lieutenant in the Army Medical Corps. After leaving the Army in 1945, he became an assistant professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins.
While doing research at the Johns Hopkins catheterization laboratory, Dr. Bing accidentally inserted a catheter into the coronary sinus, the vessel that delivers deoxygenated blood to the right atrium. He found that blood samples taken from the coronary sinus would allow him to measure cardiac metabolism in diseased and normal hearts.
“For the first time, it will be possible to measure accurately the effect of various chemical compounds on the human heart muscle and to study the effects of new drugs,” he told the New York Heart Association in 1951, announcing the technique.
In 1969, after continuing his work on cardiac metabolism at Washington University in St. Louis and serving as chairman of the department of medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit, Dr. Bing moved his laboratory to the Huntington Medical Research Institutes in Pasadena, Calif. There he helped develop high-speed cinematography of coronary vessels and carried out studies on the chemistry of the heart after a heart attack. In his 80s and 90s, he introduced a technique for measuring cardiac blood flow using nitric oxide.
Dr. Bing helped found the research group that in 1976 became the International Society for Heart Research, which appointed him its life president. With Lionel H. Opie, he founded the society’s principal publication, the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology.
In addition to publishing about 500 papers and books on medicine, Dr. Bing published several works of fiction, including “The Bisquit Principle” (2007), a satire on scientific inquiry.
A short documentary on his life, “Para Fuera” — the title is a Spanish expression meaning “away with it” — was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 16, 2010
An obituary on Sunday about the cardiologist Richard J. Bing referred incorrectly to the coronary sinus, which figured in his research. It delivers deoxygenated blood to the right atrium, not to the right ventricle.
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