Experimental techniques for measurement of optical penetration depth and refractive index of human tissue are presented, respectively. Optical penetration depth can be obtained from the measurement of the relative fluence-depth distribution inside the target tissue. The depth of normal and carcinomatous human lung tissues irradiated with the wavelengths of 406.7, 632.8 and 674.4 nm in vitro are respectively determined. In addition, a novel simple method based on total internal reflection for measuring the refractive index of biotissue in vivo is developed, and the refractive indices of skin from people of different age, sex and skin color are measured. Their refractive indices are almost same and the average is 1.533.