1936 June 1 1, Yue Weigen was born in Hongkong, China. His father is the founder of the Bank of East Asia in Hong Kong, so his family conditions are excellent. Due to the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II, Yuewei Gen's middle school was forced to be interrupted, and it was not until after the war that he entered Huaren College and finished his studies at 1952. Yue Weigen's brothers and sisters had already entered the fields of commerce, banking, insurance and law. At this time, his father suggested choosing medicine as a career. From then on, Yue Weikan began to step into the hall of science.
From 65438 to 0958, Yue Weigen received a bachelor's degree in medicine from the University of Hong Kong, and then completed his internship in the internal medicine department of Queen Mary Hospital for two years. Influenced by two famous professors from the School of Medicine of the University of Hong Kong at that time, Yue Weigen decided to abandon the traditional medical path (clinician) and enter the United States to start some scientific research. His chosen direction is hematology. Yue Weigen first came to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston to work with Frank Gardner, which really aroused Yue Weigen's interest in scientific research. Yue Weigen then went to the University of Pittsburgh to follow Jack Myers for a period of clinical research, and then went to MIT to study the structure and properties of hemoglobin with Vernon Ingram, a famous protein research expert. Ingram has made outstanding achievements in the study of protein.
Peptide fingerprinting technology was first developed in 1950s, and it was first expounded at the protein level that single amino acid variation of hemoglobin could lead to functional damage (later Yue Weikan developed a simpler genetic detection method). During this period of study, Yue Weigen had a deep understanding of the basic knowledge of hematological diseases.
After leaving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yue Weigen went to Montreal, where he got a chance to train with Luis lowenstein in hematology. It was this kind of training that laid the foundation for his future research interest. In Montreal, Yue Weigen had access to a special clinical case, a defective premature baby. The child died of severe anemia shortly after birth. At that time, the disease was called α -thalassemia, but there were only some descriptions of its clinical manifestations, and little was known about its details and pathogenesis. Therefore, Yue Weigen thinks that the study of this disease will be of great significance, which later became the main content of his scientific research. After yuet wai kan joined former mentor Gardner in the newly-built laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania for a period of time, he received an invitation from David Nathan, a colleague of Brigham Hospital, hoping to join Nathan's laboratory in Boston Children's Hospital to study thalassemia. Yue Weigen, who was already interested in this disease, was very happy to get such an opportunity and readily agreed.
From 65438 to 0970, Yue Weigen became an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, joined Boston Children's Hospital and started his own thalassemia research. Yue Weigen used the newly developed technology at that time to study the protein synthesis of different cases of thalassemia, which was helpful to determine the types of thalassemia and laid the foundation for further study of the disease. Although Yue Weiqin has achieved great success in this field and established his own laboratory foundation, he resigned from his job here on 1972, accepted a position in San Francisco, California on the west coast, became the director of hematology at San Francisco General Hospital, and served as an associate professor of medicine in the Department of Medicine and Experimental Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (eventually became a professor on 1977).
In 1970s, the foundation of molecular biology was basically established, and a series of new technologies appeared one after another, such as the discovery of reverse transcriptase and restriction endonuclease, the invention of genetic engineering and Southern blotting, which made molecular biology enter the second golden period of development. Yue Weigen also keenly captured this information and successfully applied these new developments to his own scientific research, thus achieving remarkable new achievements. Andree Dozy joined the laboratory while working in Children's Hospital and worked with yuet wai kan. It is with his help that Yue Weigen's laboratory has achieved a lot of research results. During his stay at the University of California, Yue Weigen had the opportunity to follow Bishop and Harold Varmus (two scientists shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for discovering proto-oncogenes), became familiar with the newly discovered reverse transcriptase at that time, and applied it to the genetic structure study of thalassemia patients, so the research at the protein level turned to DNA.
Yuet wai kan, Dojo and other colleagues found that globulins are often lacking in the blood of newborn patients, so they speculated that this may be caused by structural defects of genes, which eventually led to the failure of the translation process. The cDNA of globulin was obtained by reverse transcriptase, and the DNA of thalassemia patients was hybridized with this cDNA. It was found that the gene was indeed deleted and eventually damaged. This is the first time that gene deletion has been found in human diseases.
Yuet wai kan and his colleagues immediately applied this important discovery to clinical trials, and soon met a pregnant woman who gave birth to a thalassemia baby and suspected that she would give birth to a sick baby again. Yue Weigen and others used cells obtained from pregnant women's amniotic fluid for DNA testing, and found that the fetus pregnant with this pregnant woman had no genetic defect of globulin, so she would not suffer from severe anemia and could give birth with confidence. This is the first time that human beings have applied DNA technology to realize disease diagnosis and created a new field of prenatal diagnosis.
Yuet wai kan and his colleagues cut the DNA of normal people and patients with sickle cell anemia with restriction enzyme Hpa I, and then separated it by electrophoresis and detected it with globulin cDNA. The results showed that the normal human globulin gene was located in a fragment of about 7.6 kb, but a large fragment of about 13 kb appeared in the DNA of patients with sickle anemia. It was found that this was due to the mutation of a single nucleotide in the downstream sequence (outside the coding region) of globulin gene in patients with sickle anemia, thus losing the cleavage site of HPA I. Further research showed that this mutation (also known as polymorphism) was very related to sickle anemia. Soon, Yue Weiqin applied this phenomenon to the prenatal diagnosis of sickle anemia and achieved success.
Subsequently, the DNA research of other patients with sickle anemia found that most patients have this specific fragment, and other types of anemia, such as thalassemia, also have gene fragment polymorphism, so different anemia can be diagnosed according to different polymorphisms. Although this method has some problems in disease diagnosis (it can't directly identify the mutation of the target gene), it lays the foundation for the emergence and wide application of RFLP (Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism) technology, provides an important method for identifying unknown functional genes related to diseases, and is widely used in the research of evolution and pharmacogenetics.
The DNA prenatal diagnosis of sickle cell anemia and thalassemia has greatly promoted the development of medical genetics. In particular, Yue Weigen's paper 1978 represents a landmark discovery in the history of medical genetics, which has been cited hundreds of times and has become the foundation work in this field. Because of this series of achievements, Yue Weigen gained a great international reputation. 199 1 won the lasker clinical medical research award, which is known as the "little nobel prize" in the United States. In addition, Yue Weikan's honors include Dameshek Award of American Hematology Association (1979), Allen Award of American Society of Human Genetics (1984), Gadner International Award of Canada (1984), Waterford Biomedical Award of American and American Internal Medicine (1984). Warren alpert Foundation Award (1989), Helmut Horton Research Award (1995), Shaw Life Science and Medicine Award (2004) in Hongkong, China, Lifetime Achievement Award (2006) awarded by American Chinese Biologists Association, etc. Yue Weigen was elected as a member of the Royal Society on 198 1 (this is the first Chinese to win this honor), an academician of the American Academy of Sciences on 1986, an academician of Taiwan Province Academia Sinica on 1988 and a foreign academician of China Academy of Sciences on 1996. Yue Weiqin received his doctor's degree in medicine from the University of Hong Kong in 1980, and is also an honorary doctor from many universities, such as Cagliari University (198 1 year), The Chinese University of Hong Kong (198 1 year) and the University of Hong Kong (/kloc). 1983, Yue Weigen became a professor of hematology in the Department of Medicine of the University of California, San Francisco from 1984, the head of the Department of Molecular Medicine and Diagnosis in the Department of Experimental Medicine from 1984, and the famous researcher of Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute (HHMI) from 1976. Yue Weigen is also an honorary professor at many universities in China, including Hongkong University, Zhejiang University, the former First Military Medical University, the Fourth Military Medical University and Xi Jiaotong University. Yue Weiqin was the chairman of the American Hematology Association and is currently a member of the Chairman's Committee of national medal of science award. 1964, Yue Weikan married Albela Limaro in Boston and now lives in San Francisco. Yuewei Root continued his scientific research. In addition to DNA testing, it also studies the diagnosis of thalassemia and sickle cell anemia by different genetic methods. At present, experiments of gene therapy and stem cell therapy for human hereditary diseases are being carried out, such as correcting sickle anemia through gene therapy. Yue Weigen is famous for his outstanding contributions in the field of medical genetics, so he is considered to be a popular candidate to win the Nobel Prize. For example, the 2 1 predicted by Professor Rao Yi includes the results of Yue Weikan (note: some of the predicted results were verified in 2002, 2003 and 2006), which is also considered to be the most likely to make up for the regret that China scientists did not win the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. To be sure, Yue Weigen's achievements are definitely worthy of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, but considering that the possible Nobel Prize in Chemistry is mainly due to his technical application, especially Sir Southern, who invented South India, has never won the Nobel Prize (he has a higher chance of winning the chemistry prize), it is very likely that they will share the honor. Since 1993, PCR technology and nucleotide directed mutation won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, there has been no prize in the field of molecular biology technology, so the chances of winning the Nobel Prize for this achievement in recent years are extremely high. Regardless of whether he won the prize or not, Professor Yue Weigen's outstanding contribution to the development of genetics deserves everyone's understanding, especially his achievements in the field of molecular biology as a Chinese scientist deserve all China people's pride.