Zhong Shizhen: Life is like a chess game

Originally published in 2008

An undated file photo of Zhong Shizhen.[wjpmf.org]

"I am bold enough to abandon dead ends."

-Zhong Shizhen

Editor's Note:  Zhong Shizhen is an anatomist born in Wuhua, Guangdong Province, in 1925. He graduated from the Medical School of Sun Yat-sen University. In 1997 he was elected a member of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is the director of the Institute of Anatomy of First Military Medical University, the director of the medical biomechanics laboratory of Guangdong Province and the People's Liberation Army, and the director of the Trauma Treatment Scientific Research Center of Guangdong Province. He is the founder of modern clinical anatomy in China and the top authority in the field of biomechanics and tissue engineering.

As a student at Sun Yat-sen University, Zhong Shizhen's dream was to become a surgeon. But as the country needed more anatomists than surgeons at that time, he decided to become an anatomist.

Closely combining anatomy with clinical medicine, Zhong established the new discipline of "modern clinical anatomy." He is proud of his human body specimen museum, which he claims is "the best human body specimen museum in the country, and probably the best of its kind in the world." Zhong is particularly proud of a model which indicates the precise shape and distribution of blood vessels in the human body, which is of great value to medical science. The achievement won him a National Award for Science and Technology Progress (Grade 2).