Activities in the Peoples Republic of China
Since 1985 I am involved in the development and daily work of the Guest Laboratory of the Max-Planck Society in the Institute of Cell Biology, Academia Sinica, Shanghai. The purpose of this laboratory is to provide local training facilities to advanced students, Ph.D. students and postdocs in modern biology. Since 1987 I have been offering lab courses (in part together with my Ph. D. Students or other European colleagues) and lecture series in Molecular Cell Biology, Developmental Biology and Gentechnology or I have carried out research together with chinese students in the Guest Laboratory.
Starting in February 2001 I have accepted a Long Term Fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) which allowed me to work as a member of the Shanghai Institute of Biological Sciences (SIBS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for up to five years in Shanghai. During this time I have continued the teaching of Chinese students and tried to extend the connections to Europe. My own research group included European and Chinese students. A report of my earlier experiences has been published in the EMBO Reports 1(6):457-459 (2000) (see report below), in the EMBO Reports 7:850-854 (2006) (Bioethics in China) and in EMBO Reports 10:545-550 (2009) (Research in China. Experiences from 23 years of molecular genetics research in Shanghai).
Additional activities have emerged from this cooperative activity. From 1994 to 2001 I was involved in training and research at the Institute of Medical Genetics at the West China University of Medical Sciences in Chengdu/Sichuan. A cooperation with the Tongji Medical College, University of Wuhan, has been intiated in 2001.
Additional activities are trainings courses in the context of the EMBO World Programme. In 2002 the first course on Techniques in Medical Genetics took place in Chengdu, the second 2003 in Shanghai (see special page) on Cellular Microbiology, the third 2004 on Proteomics and Human Diseaeses in Wuhan. A follow-up course on bioinformatics was offered in 2005.