Hey Guys:
It is a sad day for China Agricultural University and science
community that we lost one of our greatest alumni: Xiangzhong Yang.
There are a series of news including death of Jerry Yang and his
history posted on the mainpage of Hartford courant (largest daily in
Connecticut state) which is not common in China except some great
leaders. http://www.courant.com/
Here are stories of Xiangzhong Yang published last spring
sequentially in the daily. You may find the road of a pig farmer to one
of the greatest scientist in the world.
So at this time, let us bless him. Enjoy the peace time in
paradise, Jerry!
HUNGER
UConn's Jerry Yang Is A Renowned Scientist And A Leader In The Global
Race To Clone A Human Embryo. But His Remarkable Story Begins Long Ago
And A World Away, In Maoist China.
By WILLIAM HATHAWAY | The Hartford Courant
February 18, 2007
On a rolling, treeless plain in a poor, rural village some 300 miles
south of Beijing, Yang Xiangzhong is born on July 31, 1959 -- the year
of the pig in the Chinese zodiac calendar.
Children born under that sign, Chinese astrologers say, tend to pursue
goals with all their strength. There is no left or right for ``boar''
people. They never retreat.
Xiangzhong's parents rejoice at the arrival of their second-born son,
but their joy does not change the grim mathematics of life in this small
farming village of 1,000 on the edge of the North China plain. Each acre
of land must support six or seven people, and if the Yang family is to
survive they must scrape every calorie from the soil.
Xiangzhong's birth tilts the demographic balance of power in the village
more heavily toward the Yang clan, who in the vast sweep of Chinese
history are interlopers, having arrived here a mere three centuries ago.
For more than a millennium, the village has been dominated by the Liang
family, which is why Communist Party officials call the village
Liangshan Jia. Both the Liangs and the Yangs call the cluster of earthen
homes Dong Cun, or East Village.
Even though there are several settlements within a few miles, farmers
seldom walk beyond their fields of wheat or corn. The inhabitants of
Dong Cun live in isolation in the heart of the most populous nation in
the world, intimate partners in a precarious bargain with land and nature.
The bargain is about to be broken.
The year of Xiangzhong's birth is, as the Chinese curse says, an
``interesting time.'' Supreme Leader Mao Tse-tung wants to catapult
China into the ranks of industrial nations and cement its role as an
emerging world power. Upsetting centuries of rural tradition, Mao calls
upon villagers across the nation to forge steel as well as tend their crops.
It is Mao's Great Leap Forward, and it is a disaster. Bad weather and
worse policy cause a catastrophic famine. Millions die of starvation.
In Dong Cun, where the misery ravages one family after the next,
Xiangzhong's aunt comes by to check on her brother's family. She looks
down at the emaciated infant and is shocked.
``Is he still alive?'' she asks.
It takes a year for the sharp bite of famine to slowly withdraw from
Dong Cun, only to be replaced by the dull ache of hunger. As bad as
times are, Xiangzhong's family has a touch more to eat than the
neighbors because of the 10 cents a day Xiangzhong's father, Yang
Wu-kui, earns teaching school.
Dong Cun had few teachers before World War II, but in 1947, Yang Wu-kui
took a small knapsack with rice and a bowl and walked 20 miles to take
an entrance exam for the Chinese equivalent of middle school. Yang
Wu-kui's parents believed that if the teenager could learn to read and
write, he could earn a few yuan recording documents for their illiterate
neighbors. Yang Wu-kui was elated when he became one of a handful of
farmers' sons in his country to be accepted to school.
That passion for learning was passed down from Wu-kui to his children.
But it becomes clear early that the desire is strongest in Xiangzhong.
A Brother's Care
When Xiangzhong is 9, his mother gives birth to her fifth and last
child, a boy. The father takes Xiangzhong aside and tells him, ``You
must care for your brother. Your mother is needed in the fields.''
Xiangzhong cleans and dresses the infant every day. He chews hard sweet
potatoes into a soft paste, then pushes it into the baby's mouth with
his tongue. He bundles his brother in a homespun cotton blanket and
takes the baby with him to the rudimentary village school.
But Xiangzhong's teacher takes one look at the infant, proclaims him
disruptive and orders the children home. Xiangzhong does not go home. He
positions himself outside the classroom window. There, day after day,
through heat, dust or bitterly cold winds, the hungry child squats,
devouring the teacher's lessons, feeding his baby brother the yams that
he desperately wants to swallow himself.
Xiangzhong's intense desire to learn is at odds with the goals of Mao's
Cultural Revolution, which prizes dedication to the party over personal
ambition.
In a massive political, cultural and geographic upheaval, millions of
students join the Red Guard to ensure the proper level of revolutionary
ardor among the people. Many intellectuals are killed or sent to work on
farms. China's university system is gutted. College entrance exams are
abolished.
In the early 1970s, however, Communist Party officials back away from
some of the movement's excesses and relent ever so slightly. They begin
to select students for advanced study based upon their work ethic and
commitment to the party.
Xiangzhong's father lobbies party officials to take his oldest son.
Under Confucian tradition, the entire family works to advance the career
of the eldest boy, and Xiangzhong knows his brother's selection from
among all the youth of 17 villages is a great honor. He feels great
pride that his brother will be one of the first from his village to
attend college. He also strives to hide a deep and abiding sense of
disappointment. He knows party officials will never select a second
member of the same family in the same village.
Xiangzhong, still frail from his bout with starvation as an infant,
resolves to serve his country and village through hard work. He chooses
the dirtiest and least prestigious job in his village -- the care and
feeding of pigs. He and his assistant, a mentally retarded man, spend
their days slogging through waste and offal to clean out pig pens and
feed the animals from scraps of village garbage.
His mother is appalled at his choice.
``You will never find a wife with that filth all over you,'' she scolds
him in disgust.
``I will raise the best pigs in the district,'' Xiangzhong responds.
While he labors, he sings songs he learned from party cadres as a child.
Local officials honor him for his diligence. They whisper to him that he
has a future as a Communist Party functionary, one of the highest honors
to which a villager can aspire.
A Thirst To Learn
One day in 1977, Xiangzhong is walking home from work and a friend tells
him the Communist Party has reinstated the national college entrance
exam, which had been abolished a decade earlier. Although party
officials have promised him a political job, Xiangzhong gambles that if
he can score well on the test, he might be chosen to attend a local
agricultural college. He has only 28 days to prepare. Every night, after
tending the pigs, he reads any book he can find in the village.
On the day of the exam, tens of millions of Chinese set out to district
test centers. Across the most populous nation on Earth, a half
generation of the best, brightest and most ambitious youth are on the
march with a single goal in mind. Many, like Xiangzhong, are in their
late teens. Many others are in their 20s, 30s or even 40s. All are eager
for their first chance to obtain a higher education.
Only 1 percent of those who take the exam that first year are admitted
to college. In China, this first class is dubbed the ``Fortune-favored
Children'' and the campuses they attend the ``Edens of Contemporary
Youth.'' Most rural students attend agricultural colleges in the
countryside, but Xiangzhong is not admitted to one of them.
Instead, he is one of only 400 students from across China to be admitted
to Beijing Agricultural University, the most prestigious agricultural
school in the country.
Having never traveled more than a few miles from his home village,
Xiangzhong soon finds himself in China's capital. The first few days in
the big city, he sleeps in the university hallways because the Red Army
has balked at abandoning the buildings they occupied for so many years
during the Cultural Revolution. When the military leaves, Xiangzhong is
assigned to a room he will share with five roommates.
That same year, a Western-educated pioneer in the in vitro fertilization
of farm animals is restored to his post at the university. An Min, who
had been banished to the countryside for insufficient revolutionary
zeal, notices Xiangzhong's ambition and intellect and urges him to
explore the mysteries of animal reproduction.
By the early 1980s, with the costs of Mao's Cultural Revolution
apparent, China begins to ship its best and brightest students overseas
for the graduate education it is not equipped to provide.
Among the ``Fortune-favored Children'' who take a new national exam,
Xiangzhong receives the highest score in the country among those seeking
an overseas degree in animal science.
Just five years removed from the hip-deep muck of a pig pen, Xiangzhong
prepares to leave China for the United States.
He vows he will someday repay the debt.
TRANSFORMATION
The Chinese Pig Farmer Arrives At Cornell, Where He Takes A New Name And
Learns About Boomboxes, Halter Tops And Genes.
By WILLIAM HATHAWAY | The Hartford Courant
February 19, 2007
In a small apartment in Ithaca, N.Y., several Chinese-born students at
Cornell University are busy giving Yang Xiangzhong pointers on how to
cope with life in America.
First, you must flip your family name from front to back, they urge. And
it isn't enough to make your name Xiangzhong Yang. American tongues will
choke on the phonetic subtlety of Xiangzhong, they tell him, mocking
botched English pronunciations of his name.
``You must pick an American name,'' one says. The others nod in agreement.
Xiangzhong is at a loss until he recalls the cartoon mouse who outwits a
cat named Tom on television.
``I'll be Jerry,'' he decides. ``He seems like a pretty smart mouse.''
Beginning in the fall of 1983, Jerry Yang takes the first tentative
steps toward becoming an American. He envisions only a temporary
suspension of his Chinese identity, but Yang will put down deeper roots
in his adopted country than he ever anticipated.
As he adjusts to life in sleepy Ithaca with its tree-lined boulevards,
Yang leans heavily on his wife, Tian Xiuchun, who takes the name Cindy
Tian after her arrival at Cornell.
Tian's English is better than her husband's. She is a city girl raised
in Beijing, more sophisticated than her rustic husband, who navigates an
alien campus at eye level with boomboxes and halter tops. She shops for
clothes for Yang, whose only suit in China was the ubiquitous gray wool
Mao suit -- four large pockets in front of the tunic and a high round
collar.
They had met in Beijing years earlier. Tian, a young Chinese scholar,
wasn't exactly swept off her feet by the diminutive agricultural
scientist, a particularly unromantic suitor. Yang forgets birthdays,
never buys flowers or sends love notes.
But Tian loves the intense enthusiasm and optimism he brings to his
work. Yang may not be romantic, but he is persuasive. Although she is
bound for Cambridge University in England, she agrees to go to Ithaca
and marry him. Then he talks Cornell into taking Tian.
``Is she as smart as you?'' the dean in charge of foreign students asks
in an interview.
``Smarter,'' Yang says.
Yang is shy and flashes a disarmingly impish grin from under a sweep of
black hair in a style less of Mao than Mo of the Three Stooges. Yang
seldom discusses world politics and in public never criticizes the
Chinese government. He hews to an old Chinese saying: ``If you are going
to beat your dog, close the door.''
Tian is more like their American friends, direct in her speech and
willing to discuss shortcomings of their respective governments. ``If
people had as much freedom as we do here, there would be major chaos,''
Tian says of China. ``There are just so many people.''
A Sense Of Obligation
Besides his wife, Yang relies heavily on the advice of his mentor,
Robert Foote, a professor of animal science. Cornell is a destination
for many Chinese students, in part because of Foote's friendship with An
Min, dean of Yang's alma mater, Beijing Agricultural University. It was
An Min who told Foote about the promising young embryologist.
Foote, like many Western scientists who opened their labs to the first
wave of post-Cultural Revolution Chinese students arriving in the 1980s,
is both impressed and somewhat bewildered by his new charges. They are
different in many ways than American and other foreign students. For one
thing, they work much harder.
Even after Tian gives birth to their son, Andrew, in 1988, she works a
full-time job while pursuing a doctoral degree in molecular biology.
Both Yang and Tian feel an abiding obligation and gratitude to China for
sending them overseas. If a day goes by without working, they feel a
sense of shame.
Foote and other senior scientists notice something else about their
Chinese charges, who were raised in a culture that gives great deference
to authority and under a political system that ruthlessly punishes
dissenters. Try as they might, they cannot get their Chinese students to
challenge their superiors or propose their own research projects.
But for Foote and other American scientists, the presence of Chinese
graduate and postdoctoral students in their laboratories is a blessing
in countless ways. Seven days a week, the students run day-to-day lab
operations. Their dedication enables American scientists to publish a
prodigious amount of research during the 1980s and 1990s. During Yang's
stay, the Cornell College of Agriculture, and Foote's lab in particular,
builds a national reputation for excellence.
In his decade at Cornell, Yang dwells on a single overriding goal -- to
use his knowledge of animal embryology to help feed rural China. Yang
masters new micromanipulation technology that allows him to study how
embryos develop.
He believes that by intervening at an early stage of development, it may
be possible to coax the fertilized egg of a valuable animal to divide
into two -- or more -- genetically identical embryos. The embryos from,
say, a champion dairy cow could then be implanted into surrogates,
yielding a crop of potentially productive cows.
He also presses Western scientists to visit China, and Chinese
scientists in the United States to spend at least a few months each year
back home. For him personally, the question of returning to China is not
so much about if, but when.
His message is a hard sell. His fellow Chinese students are not
returning home. Even before the People's Liberation Army crushes
protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989, the students begin settling down
and raising families in the United States.
Yang understands his peers' reluctance to return. The best higher
education institutions in China, gutted by the Cultural Revolution in
the 1960s and 1970s, lag far behind U.S. universities. But he asks his
fellow students: How can life ever get better in poor villages if you
will not bring your knowledge home? How will China ever rebuild its
higher educational system without you, the brightest students?
Going Home
The next year, in 1993, Yang decides that it is time to pay his own debt
to China. He makes plans to go home.
During the spring, Yang and Tian go to Beijing to explore potential
academic openings. They are standing at a busy Beijing intersection,
when their 5-year-old son, Andrew, wriggles out of the clutches of his
grandmother and runs off the curb. The couple hears the thud of a
military car hitting their son. Andrew flies 40 yards through the air
before he hits concrete. The blow is so fierce it snaps Andrew's right
leg in half. Doctors later find that his brain is 30 degrees off kilter.
At the hospital, Yang and Tian panic. They know that Andrew is receiving
woefully substandard care by U.S. standards. They fear for their son's
life. They have no idea where they can go to find better care.
They are also furious at the condition of the military vehicle that
struck their son; the vehicle's brakes had failed. They complain
bitterly to authorities about the negligence that nearly killed Andrew.
Government officials counter by threatening to revoke their visas. The
couple fears not only for the health of their son, but also for the
lives and careers they have built in the United States.
``You realize then that you do not live in a science lab,'' Tian says.
``You live in the real world.''
It is not until six weeks later that authorities relent and allow them
to leave.
Robert Foote drives to the Syracuse airport to pick up the couple. In
the airport terminal, he looks down a corridor and spots Yang, carrying
his son in his arms, tears running down his face.
Tian puts an end to family discussions about a return to China. Andrew
grows up hating the government of the country his father loves, though
Yang still nurtures a dream of helping poor farmers who live on the
desolate rolling plains, one calamity away from starvation.
A startling scientific discovery will soon supply him the tools for a
breathtaking gift not only to China, but to the world.
DISCOVERY
The Scientist's Mind Expands, And So Do His Experiments. But On The
Verge Of A Breakthrough, His Curiosity Evaporates. Opportunity Escapes.
By WILLIAM HATHAWAY | The Hartford Courant
February 20, 2007
Jerry Yang is thinking hard about the contents of a Styrofoam cooler
inside his lab, while outside the window a couple of revelers at Cornell
University are jump-starting their Saturday night.
The cooler sits in a refrigerator at the end of several rows of
slate-smooth laboratory benches boasting obligatory microscopes,
centrifuges and glass cupboards filled with beakers, chemicals and cases
of pipettes. Nestled inside is a six-pack or so of rabbit eggs left over
from the week's experiment in animal reproduction. Yang can't figure out
what to do with them.
On a whim, he decides to try the scientific version of a magic trick.
What would happen, he wonders, if I take the genetic code -- or DNA --
from an adult rabbit cell and drop it into a rabbit egg that's already
had its DNA removed?
The trick had its roots in a ``fantastical experiment'' by German
scientist Hans Spemann in 1938 -- a process scientists came to call
somatic cell nuclear transfer, but most people know as cloning.
In the decades following Spemann's notion, scientists succeeded in
cloning tadpoles and frogs. They always used DNA from embryonic cells,
the raw cells from which all organisms develop. But every time
scientists tried to use a somatic, or more mature, cell -- the kinds of
cells that have already turned into a body part or an organ -- they failed.
No scientist in 1989 really thinks it is possible to take a somatic cell
and create new life. Old cells, well, are just old. They can't become
young again. Once a cell starts down a developmental pathway toward
becoming muscle, skin or brain, study after study shows there is no
turning back the biological clock. Eventually, cells stop dividing and
die. Aging for genes, like for people, is a one-way street.
But despite decades of failure using adult cells, the idea of cloning
still intrigues animal embryologists like Yang.
``I just want to see what happens,'' Yang tells his colleagues.
Yang's mentor, Robert Foote, a professor of animal science at Cornell,
looks at the experiment as a kind of interesting intellectual diversion.
If you use DNA from mature cells, can you coax a cloned embryo to divide
five, 10 or even 20 times before the inevitable happens and it dies?
A Rabbit Trick
Yang's goals have always been pragmatic; he has vowed to develop more
productive farm animals to help improve the lot of rural Chinese, a
dream rooted in the relentless hunger of his childhood. But what if he
could go beyond that and create genetic duplicates of champion dairy
cows or stud farm animals?
For three straight mornings after he fuses the rabbit DNA into his
leftover eggs, Yang slips a petri dish under a microscope. Each day he
manipulates the lens with his doll-like hands and expects to see corpses
of eggs suspended in the culture.
Instead, he is stunned. He sees a few embryos -- each still round but
with ruffled edges like flowers, the signs of cell division and emerging
life.
After two more days, Yang is even further surprised when he sees that
one of the embryos has reached what scientists call the blastocyst stage
of development -- the stage at which an embryo has developed enough to
be successfully implanted into a uterus.
Yang is both excited and mystified. He has some theories about why the
embryo has survived but there is one explanation that never crosses his
mind -- that cloning has somehow reprogrammed DNA from the adult cells
and become young again.
That just doesn't happen. And because it doesn't, Yang never thinks to
take the next logical step: implanting the cloned embryo into the womb
of a female rabbit to see if it will continue to develop into a baby rabbit.
Like almost all scientists of his generation, Yang knows that older
donor DNA can never create a living organism, and Yang files away the
experiment's strange result as a curiosity. He goes back to work, trying
to improve reproductive efficiency in farm animals.
Methodically and diligently, research project by research project, Yang
continues to build a sterling reputation within the backwater discipline
of animal reproduction. Foote retires from Cornell, which had different
plans for his lab, and Yang looks elsewhere for a job. Only two schools
express interest in hiring him. In 1996, he chooses the University of
Connecticut agricultural school over Rutgers University. He moves his
wife, fellow scientist Cindy Tian, and their 8-year-old son, Andrew,
into a colonial-style home on a wooded lot southwest of the Storrs campus.
He is still settling in during the spring of 1997 when news of the birth
of a sheep named Dolly in a rural village in Scotland the year before
stuns the world.
To the amazement of both scientists and laymen, animal embryologist Ian
Wilmut has taken DNA from the frozen udder cell of a 6-year-old sheep,
fused it into an egg that has had its nucleus removed and created a
clone named for the amply endowed singer Dolly Parton.
The cloning era explodes on the popular culture -- and in the political
arena.
The world press turns its focus to the more bizarre implications of
cloning. Always a fixture in popular imagination, science has now proved
it is possible to create a baby that is the twin, the exact genetic
duplicate, of a living adult. Some predict scientists will soon
resurrect Adolf Hitler and his notions of a genetically superior race,
like the Nazi scientist in the novel and movie ``The Boys From Brazil.''
There is, at the same time, a deep undercurrent of public discomfort
with the very nature of cloning. Amoebas clone themselves by reproducing
asexually, but animals do not. Cloning rids procreation of sex and its
messy mix of genes. Men become irrelevant to the creation of life. With
Dolly, science fiction plots -- as well as a sheep -- spring to life.
A Theory Overturned
But Yang and other scientists pay little mind to science fiction or
political squeamishness as they grasp the monumental significance of
Dolly. She has nothing to do with abolishing sex or resurrecting Hitlers
or Mozarts.
Dolly means the world's biologists have gotten it all wrong. She proves
DNA can become young again, that scientists can reprogram DNA to become
any other type of cell in the body.
For scientists, the ultimate seduction of cloning is this: Our genes, if
not our bodies, can be immortal.
In his seminal book, ``The Structures of Scientific Revolution,'' Thomas
Kuhn in 1962 wrote that this is exactly how all scientific breakthroughs
work. Theoretical edifices arise and scientists spend years buttressing
them with their research. The scientists themselves become vested in the
theory and feel threatened by research that might subvert it. Then along
comes a discovery that overturns the old framework. Kuhn called such
groundbreaking works ``paradigm shifts.''
Dolly was a paradigm shift, a breakthrough that becomes even more
significant a year later when scientists isolate human embryonic stem
cells. That means it is not only possible to make cells young again, but
to remove them from an embryo and use them for a vast array of purposes
-- including medical research.
As the next decade unfolds, stem cell research becomes enmeshed in the
public's angst over cloning. Together, they ignite a firestorm of
ethical and political debate. But for Yang and others, the promise of
Dolly cannot be ignored.
The news of Dolly's birth has a profound effect on Yang, both
professionally and psychologically.
He knows he has the expertise and knowledge to become a pioneer in this
new scientific arena. At UConn, he now has his own lab with the tools to
take full advantage of the breakthrough. In the short term, Yang has a
way to fulfill a lifetime dream: He can clone embryos of farm animals
and improve the lot of poor Chinese farmers like the ones he grew up with.
But as Yang thinks through all the implications of Dolly's birth, he
begins to formulate another, much more Western dream. He may one day be
able to use cloning to cure human disease. Stem cells from an embryo
have an infinite biologic potential. In theory, Yang knows, he can
create an embryo using DNA from a chronically ill patient and create
cells that could repair almost any damaged tissue -- heart, skin, lung,
brain -- without fear of immune rejection.
He can produce a true cellular fountain of youth.
Yang is also mortified by the news of Dolly's birth. Eight years ago, in
that lab at Cornell, he was on the verge of the same scientific
epiphany. But when he didn't think to implant his developing blastocyst
into a rabbit, he failed to take the simple step Wilmut took.
``Dolly does not represent a breakthrough in technology,'' Yang tells
his friends and colleagues. ``It is a breakthrough in thinking. Always
follow what the data say.''
Years later, Wilmut gives Yang a present -- a coffee cup covered with
images of cavorting sheep. The sheep on the cup look exactly the same.
They are clones.
When Yang sips his tea from the cup, he reminds himself never, ever, to
let such an opportunity pass him by again.
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origin posted by Kun Zhang