First Published on: 22 March 2007
DOI: 10.1080/15216540701210208
a quite interesting article, Tsou Chen-lu's wife's English name is Anna.
Tsou and family.
I first met Chen-lu when he joined the Molteno Institute at the University of Cambridge nearly 60 years ago. He had travelled to England on a scholarship funded by reparations paid by the Chinese Government in the settlement after the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. He was first sent to Birmingham University, but on the recommendation of Yin-lai Wang was accepted as a graduate student by David Keilin, the Director of the Molteno Institute. Chen-lu's wife Anna enrolled as a graduate student in the Department of Metallurgy for her PhD. My wife and I became close friends with Chen-lu and Anna during their stay in Cambridge.
Tsou's thesis was on some properties of cytochrome c. The effect of digestion with pepsin was reported to the First International Congress of Biochemistry in Cambridge in August 1949 (1,2). The end product of the digestion still contained the core of the protein with the haem bound to a polypeptide about one fifth the length of cytochrome c but, in contrast to the intact cytochrome, the haem was easily accessible to ligands. This was the first step towards the eventual elucidation by others of the structure of cytochrome c. His thesis also dealt with the apparent differences in the activity of cytochrome c bound to respiratory particles isolated from heart muscle and purified cytochrome c (3) and on the effect of cyanide on succinate dehydrogenase (4). In the course of this work he concluded that this enzyme is itself an electron carrier. Chen-lu has published his reminiscences of his period in the Molteno Institute working under Keilin (5). It was while he was in Cambridge that the People's Republic of China was founded, a step that he welcomed.
Chen-lu and Anna were awarded their PhD degrees about the same time in 1951 and both departed for China, Anna via Stockholm and the trans-Siberian railway and Chen-lu by ship. Chen-lu took up a position in the Institute of Biochemistry of the China Academy of Science in Shanghai where Yin-lai Wang was Director. He took back with him a microspectroscope that I had purchased in London. I received an enthusiastic letter from Chen-lu shortly after his return but thereafter, as contacts between the west and China had become increasingly restricted, the only communication that I can recall was the happy news of the birth of his daughter Ping.
I next heard about Tsou when I met Yin-lai Wang at the Third International Congress of Biochemistry in Brussels in 1955. At that meeting, in a session I chaired, Yin-lai Wang reported that he and Tsou had established that succinate dehydrogenase is a flavoprotein, confirming Tsou's conclusion in his thesis that it is a hydrogen carrier.
Six years later, I attended the Fifth International Congress of Biochemistry in Moscow. When, after arriving early in the morning by train from Leningrad, I reached an almost deserted floor of the Hotel Moskwa where my room was located, I found Chen-lu sitting alone in a corner reading the Congress Abstracts. Although our first meeting for 10 years was warm, it was clear that Tsou was under some constraint and there was little further contact during the Congress. Then unknown to us, this was a time of tension in China with the break with the Soviet Union. Tsou gave two papers to the Congress, one on the nature of the binding of the flavin in succinate dehydrogenase (6) and one on papain (7). The action of proteolytic enzymes, begun with his first work on the action of pepsin on cytochrome, became a lasting field of interest.
At about this time, China resolved to undertake a scientific spectacular by making the first chemical synthesis of a protein, namely insulin. This was achieved by a team of biochemists and organic chemists with the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry the lead Institute. Tsou's role was to join the two synthetic polypeptides by oxidation of their thiol groups to form the correct disulphide bridges (8).
My next meeting with Tsou was a great surprise. In April 1966, nearly five years after the meeting in Moscow, my wife and daughter and another family from my laboratory in Amsterdam travelled by train to Warsaw to attend the 3rd FEBS Meeting. When we arrived a bus was waiting to take us for an excursion to the city and surroundings and in the bus sat Chen-lu, all arranged by our Polish friends. We had a most enjoyable chat catching up on news of family and friends. During the meeting, Yin-lai Wang gave an account of the chemical synthesis of insulin.
News about the Cultural Revolution and the indignities and hardships imposed on the intellectuals made us fear for the fate of our Chinese friends and colleagues, who were for several years completely cut off from any communication. In the late 1970s soon after the death of Mao and the opening up of relations with China I was surprised and delighted to receive a letter from Tsou written from London which he was visiting as part of a delegation. This renewed contact encouraged me to make use of a newly established exchange programme between the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science and the Academia Sinica to visit China, not only to make contacts with Chinese biochemists but also as Treasurer of the International Union of Biochemistry to reopen the question of China rejoining the Union. The Academia Sinica had withdrawn from the Union in 1965 as protest against the admission in 1961 of the corresponding body in the Republic of China in Taiwan.
Chen-lu Tsou was my host not only in Beijing but also during trips to the Academy Institutes in Shanghai and sightseeing in Hangchou which gave ample opportunity to learn about the difficult previous decade in China. Chen-lu had been unable to carry on any scientific work in Shanghai when the Cultural Revolution was at its height. However, some time in the mid seventies, Anna and Chen-lu were moved to Beijing to take care of Anna's father, a distinguished geologist, who was in declining health. Chen-lu was transferred to the Academy Institute of Biophysics and Anna to the corresponding Institute of Physics. However, Chen-lu had no equipment for experimental work until the end of the Cultural Revolution and had spent his days reading the scientific literature. When Emil Smith, who had also worked at the Molteno Institute (before my or Chen-lu's time) was on an official post-Nixon visit to China and asked to see Chen-lu at work. Chen-lu stacked rows of reagent bottles on the shelves filled with water to give the impression of scientific activity. Emil told me many years later that he was not taken in!
My preliminary discussions with officials from the Academy in the presence of Chen-lu concerning China's place in IUB were the start of extensive contacts later in the year together with Bill Whelan, Secretary General of IUB, with both Chinas that led to a successful outcome, as recorded in detail elsewhere (9).
Chen-lu was now able fully to return to his biochemical research and to training the next generation of Chinese biochemists. He encouraged his students to obtain further training abroad and I was pleased to have one of them, Qin-shi Zhu, obtain his PhD in Amsterdam under my guidance. Chen-lu worked on various aspects of enzyme kinetics and on the folding of proteins. He established the quantitative relationship between the modification of the side chain functional groups and the inactivation of the proteins, the irreversible modification kinetics of enzyme activity and the flexibility of enzyme sites. He attended scientific meetings all over the world and an international symposium was held in his honour in Beijing on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Despite a decade of enforced inactivity in a period that might have been his most productive, 118 papers, mostly published in international journals, are listed in PUBMED.
It was a great pleasure for me after my retirement to be able to retain contacts with Chen-lu during my frequent visits to China in the 1980s or at symposia, we shared family news at Christmas and he stayed with us in Lymington and gave a lecture at Southampton University when he visited the UK as part of a Parliamentary exchange programme.
Chen-lu Tsou was elected a member of the Chinese Academy of Science in 1980 and a Fellow of Academy of Sciences in the Developing World in 1983. For many years he served on the National Committee of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference, the national top advisory body.
Chen-lu Tsou was meticulous in his own research and in his later years he spent much of his energies in fighting what he termed unhealthy practices in conducting scientific research, what is normally more bluntly referred to as 'scientific fraud'.
Although suffering from cancer, Chen-lu Tsou worked in his Institute up to the day he died. He will be remembered by many as one to whom Chinese biochemistry owes much. If he had survived he would have been an honoured participant at the next International Congress of Biochemistry to be held in Beijing in 2009. I remember him also as a dear friend of more than 50 years.
His wife Anna Tsou died a few years before Chen-lu. His daughter Ping and grandchildren survive him.