It is 20 years since Fellow of the Royal Society and British scientist Anne McLaren visited the Institute of Genetics, the oldest of China's scientific ventures studying the DNA at the heart of living matter. A lot has changed.
'It's good to see good science being done with good equipment . . . rather than gleaming, custom-built labs,' she said at the institute, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, during this month's International Congress of Genetics. It was the first time since the International Genetics Federation began its five-yearly congresses in 1899 it has been held in China.
It was a diplomatic way of glossing over the lack of huge, sparkling metal and glass laboratories found now in Western research sites. Built in 1959, the institute's small rooms are fitted with wooden benches and paint-peeling shelves housing bottles of chemicals. They look much as Watson and Crick's workspace did in famous photos of the Nobel laureates who discovered DNA's double-helix structure in 1953.
Most of the instruments in use at the institute were not the latest models, but were good for the jobs required, said visiting foreign scientists from the United States and Europe. Being the summer, not much science was actually going on - but the potential was apparent.
Hong Kong-born Tye Bik-kwoon, now of Cornell University in the US and an adviser to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, agreed great strides had been made since she had been invited to brainstorm China's scientific opening-up 20 years ago. At that meeting premier Deng Xiaoping told the eminent overseas Chinese researchers, including Nobel physics prize-winner Yang Chen-ning, now of New York University at Stonybrook and Hong Kong's Chinese University, his goal was to catch up with the US within 40 years. 'We thought he was dreaming,' she said, 'but now you look at what they've done in 20 years and it doesn't seem such a dream.' Mainland genetics studies, like the rest of science there and the country itself, has a famous, turbulent history. For the first half of the century, according to 80-year-old Jim Crow, professor emeritus of genetics at the University of Wisconsin and an observer of much of this 20th-century scientific field, 'Chinese genetics was essentially the Western pattern'. Indeed, in some studies, Chinese scientists were pioneers: Professor Tan Jiazhen - better known as C C Tan - one of China's genetics leaders and the congress president who celebrated his 90th birthday during it, had impressed Professor Crow in the 1940s with his studies of ladybirds at the California Institute of Technology.
But in 1950, nine years before the Institute of Genetics was built, genetics had been thrown out in favour of the eccentric and scientifically flawed Lysenkoism followed by the Soviet Union.