XU Tian 许田

choi

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Michael Wines, A U.S.-China Odyssey: Building a Better Mouse Map. New York Times, Jan 29, 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/world/asia/29china.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=fudan&st=cse

Note:
(a) Tian  Xu, PhD, Department of Genetics, School of Medicine, Yale Universoty, undated.
http://medicine.yale.edu/genetics/people/tian_xu.profile

Quote:

"Professor of Genetics; Vice Chairman of Genetics; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Director, Yale Center for Functional Genomics"

"Education[:] Ph.D., Yale University, 1990"
(b) salad days. The Phrase Finder, undated.
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/salad-days.html
(c)
(i) Neoclassical architecture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_architecture
(Neoclassical architecture was an architectural style produced by the neoclassical movement)
(ii) Neoclassism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassicism
(Neoclassicism is the name given to quite distinct movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw upon Western classical art and culture (usually that of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome). These movements were dominant in northern Europe during the mid-18th to the end of the 19th century)

This report first mentions "Roman classroom buildings"--of Roman style.
(d) Fudan Institute of Developmental Biology and Molecular Medicine (IDM)
复旦大学发育生物学研究所
http://idm.fudan.edu.cn/
(e) gratis (adj or adv;  gratis, from ablative plural of gratia favor--more at GRACE):
"without charge or recompense : FREE <the food was supplied gratis>"
(f) Jiaxing  浙江省 嘉兴市 (sothwest to, and next to, Shanghai)   
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiaxing
(g) CC Tan or Jiazhen Tan 谈家桢

(复旦大学生命科学学院) 复旦大学遗传学研究所
http://life.fudan.edu.cn/s/84/t/296/p/10/c/3324/d/3418/list.htm
(复旦大学遗传学研究所创立于1961年; 创始人是谈家桢院士)
(h) The report says, "After postdoctoral work on fruit-fly genetics at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to the Yale School of Medicine."

"Having been awarded with a Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship, he carried out his postdoctoral training studying neural development, at the laboratory of G. Rubin at the University of California
at Berkeley, which he completed in 1993."
CNIO Cancer Conference: The Cell Cycle and Cancer. Madrid, September 30-October 2, 2002.
Spanish National Cancer Centre (Tian Xu's bio, at page 94).
www.cnio.es/eventos/descargas/CCC/04116_782,76_booklet.pdf

That is Prof Gerald Rubin.

The Spanish name of the Centre is Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas (CNIO).

(i) The report states, "The first scientist who produced genetically altered mice won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine."

I think it is an error. There were three that year: Mario R. Capecchi, Sir Martin J. Evans, Oliver Smithies.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2007/
(j) The report further comments, "A decade of trial and error rewarded Dr. Xu with the jackpot: a butterfly gene, nicknamed piggyBac, that could insert itself into the mouse genome, randomly turning off one gene per mouse.

The paper:
Ding S et al, Efficient transposition of the piggyBac (PB) transposon in mammalian cells and mice. Cell, 122: 473-83 (2005).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16096065
(k) My comment: I was unaware of the paper until now. I have not read it. But as a rule of thumb, there are hot spots where transposons tend to move into. Transpositions are believed not to be random, in other words. That is why Dr Xu hopes to generate tens of thouosands of mice to observe them. And the technology has not resolved the hardship to create a mutation by design, which is his original goal ("he seeks a holy grail: the key to what makes a mouse tick, gene by gene by gene"--paragraph 6, web page 1 of the NYT report) and which was how the three biologists won the 2007 Nobel prize in Medicine. Off hand, I can not assess impact of Dr Xu's PiggyBac.

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