Zhou Tongqing (Chinese: 周同庆; 21 December 1907 – 13 February 1989), also known as Tung-Ching Chow,[1] was a Chinese optical physicist. After earning his Ph.D. from Princeton University, he taught at Peking University, National Central University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Fudan University. He led the development of China's first X-ray tube in 1953 and was elected a founding member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1955. His research was disrupted when he was subject to severe persecution during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution. Although later politically rehabilitated, he was plagued by poor health for the rest of his life.
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Transcription
>> When I was interviewing, I was struck when I came to the NIH that a lot of the people I talked to, a lot of the investigators, were actually still working at the bench -- so the only place I interviewed in the whole country where I would go into someone's lab and they weren't in the office sitting at the computer, they were at the bench. They had gloves on, they were pipetting, and I came in and they said, "Great, let me finish this reaction and we have 15 minutes and I'll come right back, and then we can keep talking. And that really impressed me. I think I really was ... wanted to stay involved and at the bench and keep working and actually doing the science. My name is Keir Neuman. I'm a tenure-track Investigator in the Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and we're in Building 50. We're in our experimental room. So this is the room where we do our most sensitive measurements and where we built these custom measurement tools. Behind me is the magnetic tweezers. So this is a device that allows us to manipulate single molecules of DNA. We can both pull them and twist them. And it's very similar to this hose. So one end of this goes down on a microscope slide and the other end we attach to a micron size magnetic particle, and there are small magnets, which are right in here, these are where the magnets are held. And they basically apply a small force up on the bead that's attached to the DNA. And so by pulling, by increasing the magnetic field, I can stretch the DNA or I can relax it. And I can also, importantly, by rotating the magnets, I can twist up the DNA, and that's almost exactly like a hose. And so you can see, after some amount of twisting, I create ... these are called plectonemes, when the DNA forms a superhelix around itself. And what you can see is that my hands have come closer together when I form the plectonemes, exactly what is happening in the magnetic tweezers. So as I wind up the bead, it comes closer and closer to the surface. And by measuring the position of the bead along the optical axis or the height of the bead, if you will, I can determine the topology of the DNA. So what we're doing, the general technique that we apply in all of these instruments, is something called single molecule biophysics. And so what we're doing is, we're trying to investigate the biochemistry, or the enzymatic cycle, or what do individual enzymes do. The biological systems we can measure with this are anything that interacts with DNA, so it changes either the mechanics of DNA. So if an enzyme were to bind and for example loop a piece of DNA, I can see that because the extension decreases. Or a large class of enzymes we study are the so-called topoisomerases that can unknot and unlink DNA. So we wind up the DNA, and it unknots it or unlinks it, and we can follow that. Again, we can follow individual steps of individual enzymes.
Early life and education
Zhou was born on 21 December 1907 in Kunshan, Jiangsu, during the Qing dynasty.[2][3] After graduating in 1929 from the Department of Physics of Tsinghua University, he won a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to study at Princeton University in the United States.[4]
He studied under Karl Taylor Compton[1] and Henry D. Smyth at Princeton and excelled in his research.[2] He published three papers in major physical journals. His doctoral thesis, "The Spectrum of Sulphur Dioxide", was published in Physical Review in October 1933.[2][5]
Career
Republic of China
After earning his Ph.D., Zhou returned to China in 1933 and accepted a professorship in the Department of Physics of Peking University, where he established an optical lab. In 1936, Zhou was appointed Chair of the Physics Department of National Central University (NCU) in Nanjing. A year later, however, the Empire of Japan invaded China and occupied Nanjing, China's then capital. NCU evacuated Nanjing and moved with the Nationalist government to the wartime capital of Chongqing.[2]
In 1943, Zhou transferred to National Chiao Tung University, then also exiled in Chongqing. To augment his meagre income as a wartime professor, he also took up a technical position in the Kuomintang's National Revolutionary Army with the rank of a field officer. This later became a major reason why he was not trusted in Communist China.[2]
After the surrender of Japan in 1945, Chiao Tung University returned to Shanghai. Zhou served as dean of the university's School of Sciences and established its nuclear physics lab.[2]
People's Republic of China
After the Communist Party defeated the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War, the new government reorganized China's universities on the Soviet model, and part of the Physics Department of Chiao Tung University (now called Shanghai Jiao Tong University) was merged into Fudan University. Zhou, together with his assistant and former student Fang Junxin (方俊鑫), moved to Fudan as part of the reorganization.[2]
In 1953, Fudan University established the X-ray Tube Laboratory with Zhou as its director and Fang as vice director. Soon they developed China's first X-ray tube.[2][4] He also made contributions to the research of electric discharge in gases and vacuum tube technology.[4] In 1955, Zhou was elected as a founding member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.[2]
Persecution and death
During the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Zhou was denounced as a "bourgeois intellectual" and underwent struggle sessions from 1958 until 1961. Although he was one of China's top experts and pioneers in optical physics, he was sidelined when Fudan created its laser research group in the early 1960s.[2]
When the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, many prominent academics came under persecution. At the Fudan Physics Department, Zhou and his colleague Mao Qingxian (毛清献) were targeted for the worst treatment. The beatings and public humiliation drove Mao to suicide.[2] Although the worst atrocities were over by 1969 and Zhou was later politically rehabilitated, he suffered from poor health for the rest of his life.[2]
On 13 February 1989, Zhou died in Shanghai at the age of 81.[2]
References
- ^ a b Hu, Danian (2009). China and Albert Einstein: The Reception of the Physicist and His Theory in China, 1917-1979. Harvard University Press. p. 238. ISBN 978-0-674-03888-2.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Jiang Baichuan 蒋百川 (2016-06-18). "著名物理学家吴大猷、周同庆的命运交错". Caixin. Retrieved 2019-04-23.
- ^ "周同庆". Southeast University. 2018-03-30. Retrieved 2019-04-24.
- ^ a b c Gan, Fuxi (2014). History of Modern Optics and Optoelectronics Development in China. World Scientific. pp. 24–25. ISBN 978-981-4518-76-5.
- ^ Chow, Tung-Ching (1933-10-15). "The Spectrum of Sulphur Dioxide". Physical Review. 44 (8): 638–643. Bibcode:1933PhRv...44..638C. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.44.638.
This page was last edited on 21 March 2024, at 06:51