Yang Hongyuan has been interested in animals since he was a child. All kinds of mosquitoes and ants are his favorite "models". He can lie on the ground and observe ants for ten minutes.
In junior high school, Yang Hongyuan continued to be naughty. Because Yang Hongyuan doesn't pay much attention to his lessons, he can only "barely pass" every exam, but he is particularly addicted to his hobbies and has a special liking for biology, especially apes. He searched for descriptions of apes from a large number of extracurricular books, extracted words and illustrations about various apes, and then compiled the Dictionary of Apes.
1950, Yang Hongyuan graduated from high school and entered the university. Yang Hongyuan took the obscure biology major of Wuhan University as his first choice and was successfully admitted. Because he didn't like the scene of dissecting animals on the dissection table, Yang Hongyuan soon turned his attention to botany.
After four years in college, in order to devote himself to plant exploration, Yang Hongyuan "dared" to go to the countryside to participate in land reform, and went to Yichang to do alpine internship with sophomore students.
On the eve of graduation from 65438 to 0954, fill in the graduation assignment volunteer form: the first volunteer is "Alpine Investigation Team", the second volunteer is "Shanghai Institute of Plant Physiology", and the third volunteer is "Biology Department of Comprehensive University". As a result, he was assigned to the department of our school as a teaching assistant, so he took up a teaching post. There are four experimental classes every week, and Yang Hongyuan enjoys them every time. He also spent time doing experiments by himself, reading the Russian version of the textbook Plant Anatomy, and abstracting and translating anything novel when he saw it.
/kloc-in the summer of 0/955, Yang Hongyuan was transferred to Darwinism Teaching and Research Section (later renamed Darwinism and Genetics Teaching and Research Section) to assist Soviet experts who came to give lectures. Although Yang Hongyuan could only help collect translation professional materials, attend expert lectures and talk with graduate students at that time, he missed being a graduate student very much. He made full use of this opportunity to carefully observe every link of Soviet experts guiding graduate students. At the same time, he happened to see an angiosperm embryology from a large number of Russian books brought by Soviet experts, which triggered a strong interest in exploring the mystery of plant sexual reproduction.
At the same time, Yang Hongyuan and Zhou Chang, who just graduated from the Biology Department of Leningrad University in the Soviet Union, shared the same interests and eventually became lifelong partners.
Unexpectedly, when Yang Hongyuan and Zhou Chang planned to do a big job in the field of plant sexual reproduction, a massive anti-rightist struggle struck. Yang Hongyuan's mother, Yuan, was designated as an "ultra-rightist" and a "counter-revolutionary in history" and was dismissed from public office to supervise labor reform. Yang Hongyuan's father, Yang Duanliu, also suffered a heavy blow because of his historical problems and his wife's situation. As a child of this family background, Yang Hongyuan is under heavy political pressure. In the following two years, Yang Hongyuan went to the countryside twice and didn't return to school until 1962 to offer a stable course of plant embryology.
After returning to school, Yang Hongyuan gave lectures to students. Every time he spoke, he revised and enriched his lecture notes and experimental guidance. Besides explaining the basic contents, he tried to introduce the latest research progress to students. In the last textbook, Yang Hongyuan referred to 167 papers and monographs, mostly in Russian and English.
After teaching, Yang Hongyuan took the time to make great efforts in scientific research, conducted field experiments in spring and summer every year, and worked indoors in autumn and winter, and successively carried out research on crops such as wheat, rape and sesame. Finally, he chose sesame, which is relatively weak in fertilization biology, as the key research object and made progress.
Subsequently, Yang Hongyuan sorted out the scientific research achievements in the early 1960s, and published many papers in the Journal of Botany, Journal of Genetics and Hubei Agricultural Sciences, which initially attracted the attention of domestic academic circles.
However, under the political and academic environment at that time, such diligent and efficient working attitude was accused of "taking the road of' working in vain' and' opening a couple's shop'". In the end, he chose to give up the treatment of "backbone teacher" instead of academic pursuit.
10 During the "Cultural Revolution", Yang Hongyuan was forced to suspend classes, close his laboratory, write posters and criticize. Later, in the clean-up stage, he was accepted by a team, went to a foreign "political camp" and set up a "factory". He was sent to Shayang twice to "take the May Fourth Road" and "run a branch school" and was decentralized for five years.
1975 When running a school in Shayang, Yang Hongyuan plunged into a warehouse full of old books and newspapers. By chance, he found dozens of copies of foreign periodicals. He quickly chose more than 30 kinds he liked, and when he got back, he taught himself English, immersed himself in reading and abstracted one by one. This card is full of six boxes.
After bidding farewell to the Cultural Revolution, Yang Hongyuan returned to his alma mater from Shayang and reopened the course of plant embryology. During the same period, he collected all kinds of red leaves, made specimens, measured data and compiled a dictionary of red leaves.
In the early 1980s, Yang Hongyuan put forward the idea of "in vitro fertilization of plants". Therefore, he and his wife Zhou Chang led a group of disciples to explore the mystery of plant life. In the end, his persistence has achieved fruitful results: according to the biological characteristics of cells of different sexes, an effective separation method was established earlier in the world; The separated sex cells were fused in vitro, and the technology of inducing single pair of protoplasts in PEG droplets was explored, which realized the "one-to-one" fusion of sperm cells and egg cells. ...
From the 1980s to the early 20th century, Yang Hongyuan successively presided over a series of major and key projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the European Union's international cooperation projects, established the first key laboratory of plant developmental biology and the first national key discipline of developmental biology in China, and conducted a series of studies on the separation, culture, fusion and transformation of pollen protoplasts, sperm cells, egg cells, zygotes and related cell and molecular biology.
1980, Yang Hongyuan and his wife Zhou Chang jointly announced to their international counterparts that haploid plants were cultivated from unfertilized ovaries of rice for the first time, revealing the phenomenon of assisted gametophyte reproduction and parthenogenesis of sunflower eggs induced by unfertilized ovaries and ovules of rice for the first time; His research on unpollinated ovary culture of rice won the first prize 1985, and his research on enzymatic embryo sac separation won the second prize 1987.
1990, as the first China expert specially invited by the American Botanical Society, Yang Hongyuan gave a special report at the annual meeting of biological science on April/kloc-0; 199 1, Yang Hongyuan was elected as a member of the Biology Department of China Academy of Sciences (1994 was renamed as an academician) and won the third prize of the National Natural Science Award; In 2004, Yang Hongyuan's "Establishment of in vitro operating system of plant cells, fertilization and embryogenesis and research on experimental biology" won the second prize of the 2004 National Natural Science Award.
Yang Hongyuan specializes in experimental research on plant sexual reproduction, and has written a series of profound works leading the discipline, such as Forty Years of Experimental Research on Plant Sexual Reproduction, Rice Reproductive Biology, In Vitro Units of Higher Plants, Plant Reproductive Cell Biology: A New Growing Point, Haploid Plants Induced by Unppollinated Ovaries and Ovules in Vitro, and Experimental Reproductive Biology and Reproductive Cell Engineering of Higher Plants: Present and Future.
Yang Hongyuan's "Appreciating Flowers and Picking Fun" is full of sincere respect for life from a unique perspective.
199465438+February, Zhou Chang unfortunately suffered from cerebral thrombosis. Yang Hongyuan, who also suffers from gout, 10 has been taking good care of his wife who is paralyzed on the right side for many years, seeking medical advice, comforting and encouraging her to draw a brand-new world with her left hand, glowing with "second youth" and becoming a "left-handed painter". He has published works such as Facing Illness and Disability, Winter Chrysanthemum and Gem Flowers-The Story of Scientists, and Trilogy of the Race between the Tortoise and the Rabbit.
On 20 10, Yang Hongyuan was diagnosed with advanced esophageal cancer. He was optimistic and calm, and made a will early: after his death, he would not set up a mourning hall at school, and the funeral would be simple, so he didn't want too many people to attend the memorial service.
On October 2010165438+10/8, Yang Hongyuan died.