Research in China. Experiences from 23 years of molecular genetics research in Shanghai.

Abstract

My stay in China began in November 1985 with a lecture at the opening of the Max Planck Guest Laboratory in the Institute of Cell Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Shanghai (Hennig, 2000). It marked the beginning of 23 years of research and teaching at the Institute of Cell Biology and other universities throughout China. > Looking back after 23 years, the changes that have taken place in China could not have been predicted in 1985… In January 2001, I accepted a long‐term lectureship offered by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD; Bonn, Germany), which, with further support from CAS, allowed me to create my own research group within the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS). During the next five years, 32 German and seven Chinese students worked in my laboratory, including three PhD students—two Chinese, one German—seven German diploma students, one Chinese Master student and one Chinese Bachelor student, as well as several Chinese and German undergraduate students. As the rules of the German diplomatic service state that activities in foreign countries must be limited to five years, my contract with SIBS expired in January 2006. In 2005, the Max Planck Society (Munich, Germany) had established a Partner Institute with CAS that was dedicated to computational biology, and which extended the cooperation that had begun 20 years earlier with the Max Planck Guest Laboratory in Shanghai. I joined the Institute in May 2006 to participate in the development of the ‘Toponome Center’—a microscopy facility for mapping protein patterns (Schubert et al , 2006). This project eventually failed owing to difficulties in establishing the necessary facilities, and I decided to terminate my activities in China in late 2008. During more than 20 years in Shanghai, I naturally became engaged in several additional projects that have furnished me with …