Scientist Builds Bridges to Asia

Long before it was fashionable, Wallace McKeehan, Ph.D. built bridges to scientists working in Asia. In fact, he has been doing this for the past twenty years, first from the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center in Lake Placid, New York, where he was deputy director and senior scientist, and since 1993 as the director of the institute’s Center for Cancer Biology and Nutrition.

“Remember ping-pong diplomacy and then President Nixon’s stunning meeting in China with Chairman Mao in 1972?” he asks. “My mentor at the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center, Dr. Gordon Sato, immediately took advantage of all that to get involved with scientists in Asia, building long term relationships. As an American of Japanese ancestry he was particularly motivated and led the way, while I learned from and copied his excellent example.”

“In the early 1980s,” McKeehan continued, “we began working with Xiamen University and later several other institutions located in Mainland China, which sent graduate students to our labs for training. A pipeline of students developed, with students coming over one after another.”

McKeehan, who holds the J.S. Dunn Endowed Chair at IBT, himself mentored some of them, and when their thesis research was finished they would return to China and receive their doctorates from their home universities. Now students come here to get their degrees, some return to work in China, while others remain and contribute to our academic and industrial science here.

Since the early 1990s when he moved his research to the institute, fifteen visiting scientists and faculty from Asia and fifteen graduate students have studied under McKeehan’s mentorship. They have come from the Asian countries of China, Korea and Japan. He also has had five Vietnamese research staff, with some going on to attend medical school here in the United States.

The career path of Fen Wang, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Institute’s Center for Cancer Biology and Nutrition, illustrates how long-term bridging can work. He earned his B.S. degree in microbiology and M.S. degree in cell biology at Xiamen University in Fujian, China, and then received his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1994 in a joint program in chemical biology between Clarkson University, Potsdam, New York, and the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center, Lake Placid, New York. He moved with McKeehan to Texas A&M, where he began as a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Cancer Biology and Nutrition. He became an assistant research scientist and then was promoted to assistant professor in 1999. Wang has now assumed additional duties as an assistant director of IBT’s new Transgenic Models Core.

Another success story follows a different model. From Japan, Mikio Kan, M.D., joined McKeehan’s lab to work on prostate and liver cancer. After six years as an associate professor at IBT, he returned to Japan to become director of Zeria Pharmaceutical Co.’s Central Research Laboratories in Saitama. He was able to do this because he added basic and applied industrial research to his clinical research experience. A venture subsidiary of Kan’s company is now underwriting part of McKeehan’s research in cell communications and paying the cost of patenting its results. While IBT holds the patents and will receive royalties from commercializing research results, Zeria has the first right to exploit the results commercially.

“Science is global. Our efforts to bridge to scientists in other countries gain universal recognition for our research at A&M. We also see the beneficial application of our ideas in other cultures. While originally our efforts were one-way contributions, now with the explosion in global developments things are two-way, with all sides benefiting,” McKeehan explains. He has now begun working with the Chinese Academy of Sciences back in China. The academy is similar to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and last spring he spent two weeks with scientists there consulting on establishment of a new Institute for Nutrition and Human Health. The Chinese Academy of Sciences also consults closely with another faculty member in his center, Mingyao Liu, Ph.D., assistant professor, about setting new directions in the rapidly developing changes in mainland Chinese science.

---

©2006 Texas Medical Center

---

E-Mail: tmcinfo@texmedctr.tmc.edu
URL: http://www.tmc.edu/tmcnews/03_01_03/page_15.html