The CHINA CONNECTION: Michael Rossmann and his first encounter with me

Abstract

“We would have never belived it, if it were not told by Dorothy Hodgkin, Michael Rossmann of Purdue University said to me. He was referring to what the late Nobel laureate Dorothy Hodgkin announced in an international meeting about the achievements of Chinese scientists in determining the crystal structure of insulin in early 70’s. This significant contribution occurred at the time when China was still deeply entangled in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, while even in the international community there were less than a dozen protein structures solved by scientists (Michael included) from a handful of countries. Michael and I sat in his cozy dinning room.While enjoying a breakfast with his favorite applesauce, observing a wild rabbit sneaking underneath the bush in the garden, we had a long chat. That was during my first visit to his lab in West Lafayette in 1980. I first came to the United States in the autumn of 1979, when China had just begun to open its doors. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) immediately decided to send visiting scholars abroad. I was working in the Institute of Biophysics, CAS, and was among the early group of people preparing to go to the United States. Since Chinese scientists had no contacts with the outside world for more than a decade, no one even knew how to re-establish a connection with foreign scientists. My thought was simple. From the insulin project, I knew at least a little about protein structure, so ideally I would like to learn something about the nucleic acid. To my knowledge, in the U.S. there are Michael at Purdue and Steve Harrison at Harvard—the two pioneers in the field of structural virology—working on the RNA virus. Alexander Rich of MIT was also working on the structure of tRNA. Given the delicate political situation at the time, I was not sure whether it was appropriate to communicate directly with the Western world. I decided to write my application to CAS. Half a year passed, no one replied. Then the opportunity arrived, when the President of University of Wisconsin led a large delegation to China. He expressed his enthusiasm to welcome Chinese visiting scholars to his University for pursuing career advancement. In his faculty roster, I discovered that Professor*Sundaralingam’s lab was also working on the tRNA structure. Sponsored by the Chinese government, I arrived at Madison—a beautiful midwestern town. Soon after, Sunda, as people normally called him, felt pretty upset by seeing me working hard at his lab without paying me a penny. One day he informed me that he decided to give me some stipend. I told him that any money he pays me would have to be handed back to the CAS, which would result in a situation of the NIH paying the CAS. That won’t work. Eventually we reached a nice arrangement: To use his fund for my extensive academic travel to other major structural biology labs in the U.S. Thirty years ago, even in the U.S., there were not many first class structural biology labs. I was keen to see their efforts in advancing this important field in modern biology. Michael’s lab was the first one I picked for a visit. During my two-day visit, Michael and I had several long chats, in his office, at his house, while dining in a local Chinese restaurant, and strolling in the wood (strolling is one of Michael’s favorite hobbies). He described to me his early years at Cambridge, U.K. He even made a napkin sketch of the lab setting of the prestigious Cavendish laboratory, the birthplace of protein crystallography. I elaborated to him the absolutely isolated working conditions of the young Chinese group that did the insulin structure. Having heard all these amazing stories, Michael eagerly expressed his desire of