The laboratory received several samples of fetal tissue from therapeutic abortion. ..... I actually don't have any experiments to do, but I still cultured some skin and spleen tissues, and fixed the cultures and stained them with hematoxylin. I really didn't have anything special to look for at that time, but I thought maybe I could look at the formation of lymphocytes in vitro. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw some beautiful scattered chromosomes in these cells. Without telling anyone, I walked around the experimental building, went to a coffee shop and went back to the lab. The beautiful chromosomes of those cells are still there. I know they are real. I decided to check more movies and found that all of them had incredibly beautiful mitotic chromosomes. ..... I tried to study those movies and prepared some other cultures to repeat this miracle. But nothing happened. The mitotic image returns to its normal poor appearance. I repeated it twice without success. I began to think that something "wrong" must have happened to those unusual human spleen cultures, which made mitotic cells so wonderful. I spent about 3 months trying to change every factor I can think of: the composition of culture solution, culture conditions, culture temperature, the addition of colchicine, fixation steps, dyeing methods and so on. I only changed one of them at a time, but nothing happened. 1April, 952, I changed the swelling degree of balanced salt solution. Everyone in the lab washes the culture with balanced salt solution before fixing. When I mixed distilled water with balanced salt solution to reduce its expansion, the miracle happened again. It's so cool to finally solve a mystery. I realized that I had a powerful tool in my hand and began to try it on cells of other species besides human cells. I found that it can be applied to all species and all cultures.

Obviously, the first batch of human spleen cultures with wonderful mitotic images must have been washed with hypotonic solution before fixation. The only logical explanation is that a technician misread the scale when preparing balanced salt solution, so that he prepared a hypotonic solution without knowing it at all. Nearly four months have passed, and it is impossible to find out who really made this unusual liquid. I even want to kiss the cheek of the young woman who has made such an important contribution to cytogenetics today, but no one admits to making this mistake. So the heroine can only be buried [2].

It can be seen from this self-report that not everyone can seize the opportunity.

The hypotonic solution pretreatment created by Tao Chiuh Hsu in the process of human chromosome production directly led Joe Hin Tjio to point out in the report of 1956 that the chromosome number of human diploid cells was determined by this method, instead of 48 which dominated for 33 years, it was 46. Two geneticists in China initiated the history of human cytogenetics. After this achievement, Tao Chiuh Hsu did not stop. On the one hand, he and his colleagues in the laboratory constantly create new human chromosome preparation technologies, on the other hand, they quickly spread these technologies to other species, especially mammals. In many academic journals, the research papers on "mammalian chromosomes in vitro" have been published from 1952 (1) to 1963 (16). During and after this period, a lot of important papers on chromosome preparation technology and chromosome analysis were published. His laboratory has become a "holy land" for cytogenetics of human beings and mammals; Cytologists from all over the world come here to learn new techniques for preparing mitotic chromosomes. He also traveled around the world, collecting tissue samples and lymphocytes from various mammals, and then came back to cultivate them for chromosome analysis. He edited the exquisite chromosome atlas of mammals, from volume 1 published in 1967 to volume 10 published in 1977, and collected the chromosome pictures and karyotype analysis of the existing common and rare mammals, which provided extremely valuable information for the world.

It is also worth mentioning that before going to the United States, Tao Chiuh Hsu had 1 works in his early years, which is of vital significance in the history of human genetics development in China. That is, in 65,438+0,948, he first reported the genetic trait of tongue inversion, which attracted the attention of the international human genetics community. The process of this discovery is as follows.

After War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression's victory, National Zhejiang University moved from Guizhou to Hangzhou, Zhejiang. On one occasion, Tao Chiuh Hsu explained the dominant and recessive traits in the genetics class. For example, in the crowd, some people can roll their tongues, while others can't. According to Sturtevant's research, the ability to roll the tongue is a dominant feature, while the inability to roll the tongue is a recessive feature. In the audience, a female biology student surnamed Qian told him that her tongue can not only roll, but also turn up and fold, and gave a performance. Tao Chiuh Hsu realized that he had encountered human genetic characteristics that had never been reported before, and immediately began to study them as clues. This achievement was published in the American Journal of Genetics (vol. 39, 1948), titled "upturned folded tongue-a newly reported human genetic trait", with a full-page photo of a female student surnamed Qian. The article points out that after a preliminary investigation, only about 30 people in 1000 subjects can fold their tongues, which is the positive individual of this trait; Others, no matter how many times they practice, don't have this ability, which is the negative individual of this trait; There is no intermediate type. In this paper, four representative families obtained by investigating positive individuals are selected, which shows that this trait is controlled by recessive genes. According to all families, there is no cross-inheritance phenomenon, which excludes the possibility that genes are X-linked. The data provided by seven families with negative parents and positive children confirmed that they met the simple Mendelian ratio. Finally, the population study of this gene and dominant tongue rolling gene in China population will be published separately [3]. 1949 The above paper was published in the 40th volume of the same magazine, and it will be published in another article entitled "Overlapping Tongue and Curling Tongue in the Same Book of China People" by Liu Zudong and Tao Chiuh Hsu. This paper introduces the sample data in detail. The survey scope is 1043 freshmen of national Zhejiang university and all students of affiliated middle schools, whose native places cover Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Anhui and other provinces and cities 19. Among them, male 18, female 16, a total of 34, which leads to the conclusion that the frequency of overlapping tongue gene is 0. These two papers are the earliest human genetics research papers in China, which reflect the author's profound genetic knowledge and strict scientific research ability training. McKusick (MIM 189300) has included the item of overlapping tongue since 1966 published the 1 version of his masterpiece Mendelian inheritance of mankind.