George Ching-Hung Kuo is a Taiwanese scientist who along with Michael Houghton, Qui-Lim Choo and Daniel W. Bradley, co-discovered and cloned the hepatitis C virus in 1989.
[1][2] Following the discovery of Hepatitis C at Chiron Corporation, Kuo, who was working in a lab next door to Michael Houghton's, designed a test that could screen blood for the infection, and in 1988 Japanese Emperor Hirohito was the first person to receive blood that had been screened by Kuo's method.
The development of diagnostic reagents to detect HCV in blood supplies has reduced the risk of acquiring HCV through blood transfusion from one in three to about one in two million.
[8] His wife is Carol Lan-Fang Kuo, who also worked for the Chiron Corporation in Emeryville, California.
Together they worked on developing vaccines and blood-testing procedures for hepatitis C. They have a daughter, Irene Carol, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Francisco, an associate professor of ophthalmology[9] at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, and a specialist in cornea and refractive surgery at the Wilmer Eye Institute.