 | Tian Xu |
Tian Xu, vice chair of the Department of Genetics, says when he first came to Yale 20 years ago, he thought he had arrived in "New Heaven."
"The (New Haven) Green was beautiful, the campus was beautiful, and a vagabond approached me and said: 'A quarter, please,'" recalls Xu. "'Please!' I thought, 'This is the right place for me.'"
In many ways, it was heaven when compared to his days in China during the Cultural Revolution, notes Xu. His father was punished as an intellectual from a wealthy family, his mother for having an executive level job in a corporation. The stigma transferred to their children. In particular, the head of the high school, a former student of Xu's father, relentlessly criticized and humiliated Xu in public.
It was from this adversity that Xu developed a love of chess, where results were untainted -- you either won or lost -- and science, because it was more definitive than the humanities his father had taught. Science was less likely, Xu believed, to be influenced by politics.
"Nobody in our family knew what genetics was," he recalls. "They just wanted me to do something that had objective standards."
Xu will return to Shanghai in November with President Richard Levin to visit the one native institution where he was encouraged -- Fudan University. Professors at the university eagerly mentored the young man as he pursued a fledgling interest in biology and genetics.
Upon graduation, Fudan University awarded Xu a World Bank Fellowship to attend school in the United States. However, the fellowship was withdrawn when a Chinese tennis player competing in the U.S. defected. Xu was determined. He arrived in New York City with $50, lived in an abandoned building, was mugged and continued his quest for a school where he could study high-level science. His search took him to New Haven.
Xu knocked on doors at Yale until he met Spyros Artvanis-Tsakonas, a biology professor now at Harvard. They began a conversation about the one subject Xu could discuss with his limited English: Chinese food. "Spyros and I talked for about 20 minutes. He loved food," says Xu. "Then Spyros asked if I had ever done Southern (blotting). I told him I had not, but that I had read about it. He said that was good enough. 'A person who loves cooking,' Spyros said, 'could be a molecular biologist.'"
Xu had many other mentors over the next six years, among them Frank Ruddle and Sydney Altman, both Sterling Professors of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. Xu published his first scientific paper with Ruddle. Altman encouraged Xu by accepting diagrams as test answers -- it was clear he understood the science.
Xu pursued postdoctoral studies in neural development at the University of California at Berkeley with Gerald Rubin. He then returned to Yale, selecting its teaching offer over nine others. He was appointed assistant professor of genetics in 1993. Four years later, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute named Xu an assistant investigator. Today, in addition to his posts in genetics, he is a special adviser to President Richard C. Levin on science and education in China.
Xu travels to Fudan several times a year to teach students for two weeks at a time. "There are two places that changed my life -- Yale and Fudan University," Xu says. "The professors were incredibly nurturing. Today, I don't have to teach, but I insist upon it because it is so rewarding."
The trip to Shanghai with Levin next month will be an opportunity to affirm and expand Yale's commitment to the Institute of Developmental Biology and Molecular Medicine at Fudan, says Xu. Yale and Fudan created the institute two years ago to train scientists in conducting innovative research. It serves as a model for academic reform and the promotion of international exchange and cooperation.
The institute focuses on using model organisms to functionally annotate the mammalian genome. Understanding normal genetic function during development is the first step in addressing why genetic alterations lead to diseases. The culmination of the research will be to develop effective therapeutics that cure or prevent human disease.
Pursuing disease-related research is what Xu finds most compelling. "There are two things in my life that really give me pleasure -- teaching students and seeing the spark in their eyes, and making a contribution that helps people."
-- By Jacqueline Weaver
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