History of medical genetics in China / 北京大学学报(医学版)

ABSTRACT

As the completion of human genome project, application of the knowledge and techniques developed during thpast decade to the medical practice become more and more important and gain more and more attention. It is worthwhile to look back to the step prints of the development of medical genetics in China.1 The sprout of genetics in ChinaIt should be mentioned fromthe very beginning of the birth of the genetics in China to understand the historymedical genetics in China. In 1922, C.CHEN (Zhen CHEN) opened genetic courses in National Southeast Unversity after he returned from the T.H.MORGAN’s lab at Columbia University. He used Goldfish as a model fogenetic study. The Chinese scholars started their work on human genetics by survey the frequency of ABO bloogroup in the Chinese. Their result was published in1918. This was the first data of gene frequency of Chinese population, followed by reports on the inherited disease in Chinese on the frequency of color blindness in 1937. I1948, T. C. HSU described the ability to fold up the tip of the tongue as a recessive trait (MIM189300)[1,2]C.C.LI (Ching Chun LI) wrote a book,Introduction to Population Genetics, which became a wellknown book ithe world and from which a whole generation of geneticists benefited.