Following the breath-taking walk on the great wall of China
the strolling through the emperor’s summer palace and in the forbidden city
after watching a night dance on the waters of the Hangzhou west lake
and thinking in the Tsinghua campus by the flowering lotus plants
while eating every day seven new dishes of oriental taste
getting to know Zhou Bing’s family and lab and to learn
of recent advances on our biological understanding
of the iron metal ion at the 2015 BioIron
70 years after the end of the second world war
I saw the present day China in all its admirable growth
reflecting on the small personal scale of my own world.
fanismissirlis 
I left the following comment below Times Higher Education reporting on today’s announcement of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology
My recent visit to Tsinghua University of Beijing left me with a positive impression. We were fortunate to coincide with the Country’s celebrations of the end of 2nd world war (70 years), which had meant that a number of industries around Beijing had reduced their emissions and car traffic had been cut to half, clearing the skies and making the campus looking more like one would imagine the Emperor’s gardens to be (the Universities were built on such premises). Not only was outdoors inspiring, the labs were also fantastically well equiped and the students full of energy. Interestingly, my host Bing Zhou, with whom our coinciding interests lie in the study of fruit fly metal biology, shared with me his unpublished work treating the flies with artemisinin, a traditional Chinese herb component that has attracted his attention! I was therefore introduced to Professor Tu’s story, with no clue she would so soon enter the hall of fame…
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/what-youyou-tus-nobel-prize-victory-means-chinese-science
see also
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228382-000-the-modest-woman-who-beat-malaria-for-china/
Special Issue “Artemisinin (Qinghaosu): Commemorative Issue in Honor of Professor Youyou Tu on the Occasion of her 80th Anniversary” published by Molecules in 2010, including Bing Zhou’s contribution
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/molecules/special_issues/artemisinin
A belated thank you to Bing’s wonderful students who showed us around Beijing during our week there. Truly exciting projects as well on the way iron is acquired and handled by Drosophila!
