Bulletin Spring‧Summer Autumn‧Winter 1999

ranged from tackling the aging problem through the regulation of cellular antioxidant defence to protein kinases and cell division in cancer control. Wei Lun Lectures Two famous scholars visited the University in May and July 1994 and delivered public lectures sponsored by the Wei Lun Visiting Professorship/ Fellowship Programme: • Prof. Dani Rodrik, currently professor of economics and international affairs at Columbia University, gave a lecture on 17th May on the mysteries of East Asia's economic growth. Prof. Rodrik pointed out that most East Asian countries such as Japan, Taiwan and Singapore started off in the sixties with a better educated labour force and a comparatively low degree of inequality in income and wealth distribution. These when coupled w i th the close and effective interaction between public bureaucracies and the private firms had contributed to the phenomenal accumulation rates in the private sector. He believed that the role of trade policy and exports had been greatly exaggerated by both adherents of liberal orthodoxy and interventionists, as sharply conflicting pictures could be portrayed as to what such government trade policies consisted of, and what their consequences were for growth. According to Prof. Rodrik, trade policy was important not because it had been exercised appropriately and with great skill, but because it had avoided egregious mistakes that could choke off growth. Prof. Rodrik is also research associate of the US National Bureau of Economic Research, research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, program associate of the Overseas Development Council, and senior fellow of the Institute for Policy Reform. • The 1993 Nobel prize-winning biochemist Kary B. Mullis delivered a public lecture on 'Nucleic Acids: From Long Stringy Molecules to the Polymerase Chain Reaction' on 19th July. Dr. Mullis revealed to the CUHK audience how a drive through the moonlit mountains of California had given him the inspiration for the polymerase chain reaction (PGR) technique, which is now a standard laboratory tool for genetic research. Inside every living cell on the planet Earth are nucleic acids, along whose long stringy molecules are written instructions that govern the structural detail of every living creature. And PCR is a simple method that can make unlimited copies of such hereditary material (or DNA) that exists in all living organisms. The technique has widespread applications, from copying DNA contained in a drop of dried blood at the scene of a crime to obtaining significant amounts of genetic material from a single molecule of DNA found in plant or animal fossils. ' DNAhas been tamed, and all the information it contains is in our hands ... . In it we can find traces of our past, and if we can use it wisely it will help us direct our future towards peace and prosperity for all mankind,' Dr. Mullis said. Dr. Mullis now works in La Jolla, California, as a private consultant on the PCR technology and nucleic acid chemistry. News in Brief 31