Han Jisheng, male, Han nationality, is a native of Xiaoshan, Zhejiang Province. He graduated from the Shanghai Medical Institute.
Han is a professor at the Medical Department of Beijing University, and he serves as director of the Nerve Science Institute. Han has had a distinguished career in the study of acupuncture and its effects on the body and mind. He has devoted himself to the study of the acupuncture analgesia mechanism since 1965. He was the first to describe the time-space distribution pattern of analgesia due to an acupunctured acupoint on the human body. Han also proved that the secretion of abirritate chemicals by the nervous system, including hydroxyl tryptamine and endorphin, is stimulated by acupuncture. He found that specific NPY may be released in the human brain by stimulating acupoints with electricity, when the frequency is carefully adjusted. However, he also found that if the stimulation lasts for more than 2 hours, anti-analgesia chemicals, such as CCK, would be secreted in the brain. He proposed that the effect of acupuncture relies on the amounts of analgesia and anti-analgesia chemicals in addition to the relative balance between both kinds of chemicals. A nerve stimulator developed based on the principle delivers the effect of analgesia and anti-spasm, and may be used to cure the diacetylmorphine habituation.
Han Jisheng was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1993.