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Lessons from China
A SNAPSHOT IN TIMEHave you ever had the sensation of wanting to permanently capture a
moment? Such moments can grip you in a way you will never forget.
For some people, those moments center on family, close friends or re-
lated activities; for others those moments may center on nature, spiri-
tuality or religion. For most of us, I suspect, it can be a little of each.
They become the personal moments, both happy and sad, which define
our memories. It's these moments in which everything just "comes
together." They are the snapshots of time that define much of our life
experience.
The value of a snapshot of time is not lost on researchers either. We
construct experiments, hoping to preserve and analyze the specific de-
tails of a certain moment for years to come. I was fortunate enough to be
privy to such an opportunity in the early 1980s, after a distinguished se-
nior scientist from China, Dr. Junshi Chen, came to Cornell to work in
my lab. He was deputy director of China's premier health research labo-
ratory and one of the first handful of Chinese scholars to visit the u.S.
following the establishment of relations between our two countries.
THE CANCER ATLASIn the early 1970s, the premier of China, Chou EnLai, was dying of
cancer. In the grips of this terminal disease, Premier Chou initiated a
nationwide survey to collect information about a disease that was not
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