Education and Private Life
Min Chueh Chang was born on October 10, 1908, in the village of Dunhòu, which lies 64 miles (103 km) northwest of Taiyuan, the capital city of Shanxi province, in China. His family was able to provide for him a good education, and in 1933, he obtained a bachelor's degree in animal psychology from Tsinghua University in Beijing. In 1938, Chang won a national competition and was awarded one of the few available fellowships to study abroad. He went to spend a year at Edinburgh University studying agricultural science, but found that the university was not to his liking due to a combination of the cold weather and a perceived bias against foreigners there. On an invitation from Arthur Walton, Chang left Edinburgh University and went on to research ram spermatoza at Cambridge University. With his newfound interest in reproductive biology, Chang immersed himself in research, working together with other scientists such as John Hammond and F.H.A. Marshall, under the tutelage of Arthur Walton. In 1961, he was awarded a PhD in animal breeding by Cambridge University on his observations on the effect of testicular cooling and various hormonal treatments on the respiration, metabolism, and survival of sperm in animals.
Chang met his wife, American-born Chinese Isabelle Chin, in the library at Yale University, shortly after he moved to the United States. Chin assumed the role of the housewife in the pair's marriage, allowing Chang to delve into his work without domestic concerns. They have two daughters and a son together – Claudia Chang Tourtellotte, head of the anthropology department at Sweet Briar College; Pamela O'Malley Chang, an architect, civil engineer, and sustainable design consultant and Francis Hugh Chang, director of a health center in Boston, Massachusetts.
Upon his passing, Chang was buried in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, where he had lived and where the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology was located.
Read more about this topic: Min Chueh Chang
Famous quotes containing the words private life, education, private and/or life:
“As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“... education fails in so far as it does not stir in students a sharp awareness of their obligations to society and furnish at least a few guideposts pointing toward the implementation of these obligations.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“There is nothing so noble and so right as to play our human life well and fitly, nor anything so difficult to learn as how to live this life well and according to Nature.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)