Wang Yinglai

Wang was born in Kinmen County (Quemoy), Fujian Province on 13 November 1907, in the final years of the Qing dynasty.[3] He became an orphan at the age of six when his mother died.[2] His father, an Overseas Chinese merchant, had died four years before.[3] Despite the adverse circumstances, he pursued an education throughout the 1920s and 1930s, when China was mired in wars and turmoil. He graduated from the Department of Chemistry of the University of Nanking (Jinling University) and was admitted to the graduate school of the University of Cambridge in 1938, where he studied under David Keilin. After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1941, Wang stayed to teach at Cambridge and conduct research at the Dunn Nutritional Laboratory. He transferred to the Molteno Institute for Research in Parasitology in 1944.[2]

Wang returned to China at the end of World War II despite efforts by Keilin and Joseph Needham to persuade him to stay at Cambridge. Determined to help develop scientific research in China, he accepted a research professorship at the medical school of the National Central University in Nanjing, and later joined the Medical Institute of Academia Sinica in 1948.[2]

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Wang became deputy director of the newly established Shanghai Institute of Physiology and Biochemistry, under director Bei Shizhang. In 1955, he was among the first group of scientists to be elected to the newly established Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1958, he established the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and served as its director until his retirement in 1984.[2] In these capacities, he recruited many prominent Chinese scientists from abroad, including future academicians Cao Tianqin, Chen-Lu Tsou (Zou Chenglu), Wang Debao and Niu Jingyi.[4][5]

Wang's most significant contribution was the total chemical synthesis of insulin. He started the project in 1958 with a team of scientists, who first synthesized the 20 amino acids that constitute proteins, and then used them to produce chains of insulin. His team successfully synthesized insulin in 1965, the first in the world to do so. It was a major breakthrough to produce a biologically active compound from inorganic chemicals.[2]

Many scientists, including the Nobel Prize committee member Arne Tiselius and Physics laureate Chen-Ning Yang,[1] believed Wang's total synthesis of insulin was worthy of a Nobel Prize.[6] However, the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) intervened and the Chinese Communist government considered the Nobel Prize a symbol of Western decadence. Instead, Wang was held a virtual prisoner[6] in a building at his institute and forced to study Mao Zedong thought. He was unable to conduct research for most of the ten years.[6] During an interview in 1986, Wang told The Straits Times that "we were like the proverbial hare which took a long nap while others were not like the tortoise".[1]

After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Wang and his team resumed their work and achieved the synthesis from inorganic chemicals of a transfer RNA (tRNA), another significant biological molecule, in the late 1970s.[2]

Wang established several training programs for young biochemists, many of whom later became accomplished scientists, including academicians Li Zaiping, Xu Genjun, Hong Guofan, Liu Xinyuan,[4] and Wang Enduo.[7]

Wang met Liu Runling (刘润苓), a student at Yenching University, when he was recuperating from tuberculosis in Beijing. They married and had two sons, Wang Jiahu (王家槲) and Wang Jianan (王家楠). Liu worked as a teacher and started a kindergarten. She suffered from Alzheimer's disease in old age and died in 1992.[9]

Wang died in Shanghai on 5 May 2001, aged 93.[2] Academician Xu Genjun eulogized Wang with a quotation from the Tao Te Ching: "The top class of virtue is like water, which benefits ten thousand objects without any demands for return."[4]