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Columns::February 11, 2002
Black History Month observance commemorates ‘The Birth of African-American Culture’
Poet Nikki Giovanni will lecture, give reading
Governor taps two faculty for new commission to promote historical tourism
Mending (historic) fences
UGA expands its academic program at Gwinnett University Center
Willie Cole visits campus as part of artist series
Risky business
Peach State Poll finds most Georgians believe immigrants are not taking their jobs away
A world of difference
Administrative changes
Newsmakers
The British were here
Campus News
China’s Cultural Revolution put professor on ‘radical’ career path
By Phil Williams
phil@franklin.uga.edu
Life in China at the end of the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s was difficult, especially for a bright young woman trying to
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| Since coming to UGA in the fall of 1997, Haini Cai has studied numerous aspects of gene regulation. (Photo by Peter Frey) |
decide what she would study in college. The radical reforms instituted by Chairman Mao Tse-tung had left the country in ruins--a country whose art and literature were the envy of the world.
How could a girl decide what she might become when her world was so unstable it might have straddled an earthquake fault?
Haini Cai thinks back to those days in Beijing as she sits in her office on the sixth floor of the biological sciences building. With a busy lab and a growing international reputation as a cellular biologist, she sees the distance behind her every day, but mostly she focuses on what science can achieve: new information about how life works at its most basic level and cures for such diseases as cancer.
“I am very excited now that we are getting a handle on the problems we’ve been studying for so long,” says Cai. “I hope that what we are discovering will help us understand basic aspects of gene regulation, and how those aspects affect our development as humans--and how such diseases as cancer develop as well.”
Scientists around the country and the world are watching her work with interest. Already, she has published papers in Nature and Science--the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world--and her work in gene expression is drawing admirers and inquires from all over the globe.
She has come far, even though she was raised in an academic family and always thought that life in a university setting would be part of her life.
Her father studied world philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Science, and her mother was a professor of Chinese literature, so culture was around all the time. Still, the Cultural Revolution was a time when the humanities were often twisted for propaganda use, and Cai’s parents were understandably worried for their intelligent daughter.
“I asked my father for his advice on what path I should follow after high school, and he suggested science,” says Cai. “He told me that science rested on hard evidence, not what this regime or that might think was good one day and trash the next.”
Her interest in developmental biology was strengthened when she attended Beijing Teacher’s College as a biology major. A single question caught her attention and wouldn’t let it go: How does a single cell become a complex organism? Humans, for instance, have billions of cells but the same set of genes. How can the cells be so different and yet work together?
Since coming to UGA in 1997, Cai has studied numerous aspects of gene regulation. One paper in the journal Development this past year showed how gene expression is regulated by “insulators” that prevent inappropriate interactions between sets of genes.
Cai talks quietly and with a level gaze, but when she speaks of her lab’s research and promise, her voice rises slightly. She also enjoys the classes she teaches and develops strong relationships with her students.
“I really want to teach them well, so I know I have matched their talent,” she says. “These are brilliant kids, and they show their brilliance all the time. I try to use the same techniques in teaching that I do in research: work hard and stay curious.”
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