Tong Dizhou is a famous biologist in China and an internationally renowned scientist. He has been engaged in experimental embryology for nearly half a century and is the main founder of experimental embryology in China.
Tong Dizhou was born in a remote mountain village in Yinxian County, Zhejiang Province. Because of his poor family, he studied cultural knowledge with his father since childhood and didn't enter school until 17 years old.
When he was in middle school, he studied very hard because of his poor foundation, and his average score at the end of the first semester was only 45 points. The school ordered him to drop out of school or repeat the grade. After his repeated requests, the school agreed to let him try out with his class for one semester.
Since then, he has been with the "street lamp": at dawn, he reads a foreign language under the street lamp; After turning off the lights at night, he learns to review himself under the street lamp. Many things happen. At the end of the term, his average score reached more than 70, and he also got 100 in geometry. This incident made him realize a truth: I can do what others can do through hard work. There is no genius in the world, genius is bought with labor. After that, it became his motto.
After graduating from college, he went to Belgium to study abroad. During his study in Tong Dizhou, he studied hard and was eager to learn, and was well received by his teachers. After receiving his doctorate, he returned to the disaster-stricken motherland and conducted scientific research under extremely difficult conditions.
Without electric lights, they cut and separate eggs with natural light under a microscope in a dark yard; There is no glassware for cultivating embryos, so we use coarse porcelain pottery wine glasses instead, and the micro-dissector used is just a very thin glass filament pulled by ourselves; The materials used in the experiment are all frog eggs collected from the field. In this simple "laboratory", Tong Dizhou and his colleagues have completed many papers on the developmental ability of golden croaker eggs and the analysis of the ciliary movement mechanism of frog embryos.
After liberation, Tong Dizhou, as the vice president of Shandong University, studied the development law of Wenchang fish eggs, which played an important role in biological evolution, and made great achievements.
In his later years, he cooperated with Professor Niu Manjiang of Templeton University in the United States to study the relationship between nucleus and cytoplasm. They extracted a nucleic acid from the cytoplasm of crucian carp eggs and injected it into the fertilized eggs of goldfish. As a result, a descendant with the characteristics of both goldfish and crucian carp appeared, and the tail fin of this goldfish changed from double tail to single tail. This creative achievement belongs to the advanced level in the world.