In the ruby-mining town of Mogok in British Burma, a boy named Autar Singh Paintal was born on 24 September 1925 to a Punjabi Sikh family. His father, Dr. Man Singh, was a physician in the British Medical Service; his mother, Rajwans Kaur, brought a quiet religious depth to the household. Frequent transfers meant the young Autar studied in several schools across Burma before the family moved to Lucknow in 1943.

At King George’s Medical College he graduated in medicine and then completed an MD in Physiology. His thesis on the electrical resistance of the skin produced what became known as the “Paintal Index,” a practical tool later used by psychiatrists. A Rockefeller Fellowship took him to the University of Edinburgh, where under David Whitteridge he developed a single-fibre technique for recording afferent impulses from individual sensory receptors—an advance so fundamental that later physiologists spoke of “pre-Paintal” and “post-Paintal” eras of understanding.

Using this method he discovered a series of previously unknown receptors: atrial B receptors, pulmonary J-receptors (juxta-pulmonary capillary receptors), ventricular pressure receptors, stomach stretch receptors and muscle pain receptors. The J-receptors, in particular, explained the sudden breathlessness that ends heavy exercise—the “J-reflex”—and opened new ways of thinking about lung and heart disease.

He returned to India in 1953, worked at the Vallabhbhai Patel Chest Institute, served as Professor of Physiology at AIIMS, and in 1964 became Director of the V.P. Chest Institute, a post he held for more than twenty-five years. Later he served as Director-General of the Indian Council of Medical Research. Throughout he insisted on the highest standards of experimental elegance and scientific honesty, founding the Society of Scientific Values to promote ethical conduct in research.

One of his younger colleagues once asked why he continued to demand such exacting precision long after his major discoveries were complete.

Professor Paintal answered, “Nature does not forgive careless measurement. If the data are not clean, the truth remains hidden.”

He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London—the first Indian physiologist to receive the honour—Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and honorary member of the American Physiological Society. In 1986 the Government of India awarded him the Padma Vibhushan. He also received the Dr. B.C. Roy National Award, the Barclay Medal and many other distinctions, and served as President of the Indian National Science Academy.

Autar Singh Paintal died in Delhi on 21 December 2004. In the history of physiology he is remembered as the scientist who gave the world a new way of listening to the body’s sensory nerves and who never stopped insisting that Indian science must meet the highest international standards of rigour and integrity.