Min Chueh Chang - Education and Private Life

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 and, education, private and/or life:

    “There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.”
    —George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    “I say that male and female are cast in the same mold; except for education and habits, the difference is not great.”
    —Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)

    “Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we’re selling this deadly stuff anyway?”
    —Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)

    “All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples’ character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe.... What a terrible future!”
    —Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)