On April 5, 1949, at the Tang’s household on Henry Road, in the French Concession of Shanghai, large luggage items had already been transported to Hong Kong in advance, leaving only a few small boxes to carry to the airport. On the desk were two plane tickets destined for New York, with the flight scheduled to depart at 5.00 a.m. in the coming morning.
Reluctant to leave his homeland
It was already late at night. Dr. Tang Feifan and his wife, He Lian, were still awake, thinking they would fly out to a foreign country in the morning. They felt a sense of reluctance and grief at the thought of leaving their home and nation.
The couple paced back and forth nervously through each room. When they were in the study room and saw the empty bookshelves, it was then that Tang Feifan turned to his wife and said: “I feel so unfortunate at having to leave my own country and live under the roof of others!”
The gentle and considerate He Lian saw that her husband was unwilling to leave his homeland. So instead of forcing him, she told her husband: “Then let’s not go!” Just then, the wall clock in the corridor struck eleven, and there were just six hours left before the plane took off. His wife’s words encouraged Tang Feifan to stay, and this decision changed his life.
A meteoric rise in the medical world
Tang Feifan was born in Liling, Hunan, in 1897. In 1914, he entered Xiangya Medical College, and seven years later, he received a doctorate in medicine from Xiangya Medical College and was hired to teach at Peking Union Medical College Hospital.
In 1926, he was sent to Harvard Medical School in the United States to engage in bacteriological research. In 1929, he returned to China and served as associate professor, professor, and head of the Department of Bacteriology at the School of Medicine of Shanghai Central University.
In 1935, he was recruited as a researcher at the British National Institute for Medical Research in the United Kingdom. In 1937, he returned to China, was appointed the director of the Central Epidemic Prevention Department, and established the Kunming Health and Epidemic Prevention Department.
In 1947, he was elected to the Standing Committee at the Fourth World Conference of the International Union of Microbiological Societies in Denmark. In 1949, when the communist regime grabbed power, he successively served as the director of the Beijing Institute of Biological Products of the Ministry of Health and the researcher and director of the Type Culture Collection Committee of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1957, he was elected a member of the Department of Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
His outstanding contribution to medicine
Decades earlier, a Japanese scientist published a paper saying that he had discovered the trachoma pathogen and the entire Japanese media were proud of this and hyped it. Tang Feifan looked at it and said: “No, it’s not that simple!”
To confirm his inference, in 1957, he risked blindness in both eyes by asking his assistant to drop the trachoma bacteria into his eye, thus giving him the trachoma infection. Forty days later, from his two red eyes, Tang Feifan isolated the chlamydia bacteria of trachoma, which ultimately quelled the controversy about the trachoma pathogen that has been ongoing for more than 70 years.
At that time, more than half of the Chinese population suffered from trachoma, commonly known as “ten eyes and nine sands,” meaning “out of ten, nine are diseased.” When the pathogen was found, the treatment became much more accessible. Subsequently, the treatment and prevention of trachoma made unprecedented progress in just a few short years, and the previous incidences of the so-called “ten eyes and nine sands” had now dropped to about 5 percent.
Nobel Prize nominee
In 1957, the year Tang Feifan discovered Chlamydia trachomatis, the international scientific community acclaimed this discovery, and later, along with two more of his achievements, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
However, Tang Feifan missed the Nobel Prize because of his untimely death. According to the relevant provisions of the Nobel Prize, the award is given only to living people.
Tang Feifan’s contribution to medicine is not only limited to trachoma. China’s first penicillin, vaccinia virus, and others have Tang Feifan’s irreplaceable contributions.
In 1943, Tang Feifan directed researchers to use the Chinese strains he had isolated to produce China’s first batch of 50,000 units of penicillin. Later, using a set of small-scale penicillin manufacturing equipment donated by the U.S. Medical Aid Foundation, China’s first penicillin production workshop was established, producing penicillin comparable to 200,000 units per imported product.
Penicillin, in those years, was a miracle medicine, and many severe infectious diseases were often cured with a single shot.
The plague and smallpox
Throughout his life, Tang Feifan has been engaged in countless research on living people. In October 1949, there was a plague outbreak in Zhangjiakou, Chahar Province, and no vaccine was available in China to treat the infection. Tang Feifan led the research team that produced China’s plague vaccine to quickly control and eliminate the epidemic.
In the early 1950s, due to the ether sterilization method founded by Tang Feifan, the vaccinia virus vaccine was produced in China in an austere environment, and smallpox was thus made extinct in China. Smallpox was once a dangerous infectious disease with a high mortality rate, and even if it were cured, it would leave a pockmarked face on the infected individual. With the extinction of smallpox, for decades after, not a single pockmarked face was seen in society.
When Tang Feifan came across penicillin in medical papers, he immediately realized that this new drug would significantly contribute to the war victims. So he immediately began to develop it, which happened in tandem with the international community.
In 1958, under the guidance of Tang Feifan, Wu Shaoyuan isolated China’s first measles virus, M9. The successful isolation of the measles virus laid the foundation for manufacturing measles vaccines.
He would not engage in state-sanctioned corruption
As the director of the various institutes, Tang Feifan sometimes appeared very serious and did not smile much. However, he was approachable and amiable when it came to academic issues. A reading club formed in the autumn of 1942 was held every Friday at Tang Feifan’s house, and everyone, regardless of age and position, took turns to give lectures.
In 1958 there was a short-lived but highly destructive campaign called: the “Pulling Out Bourgeois White Flag Movement” launched nationwide. People who opposed pompousness and those considered to have so-called bourgeois academic views were criticized as “white flags.”
When the movement entered its climax, the Institute of Biological Products held a criticism meeting every day to pull out Tang Feifan, the “white flag” of the medical community. In the face of stormy criticism, Tang Feifan consistently adhered to his lifelong principles; he never gave in, did not say things against his heart, did not do something against his nature, and insisted on seeking truth from facts.
In the face of this pernicious persecution and being forced to stand, the 61-year-old Tang Feifan committed suicide and hung himself.
It was because of his suicide that his heroic deeds were not publicized, his name was never mentioned, and he was gradually forgotten. It was not until 1979 that the former Ministry of Health came forward to rehabilitate him.
In 1981, the International Trachoma Prevention and Control Organization posthumously awarded Tang Feifan the “Trachoma Gold Medal” for his outstanding contribution. By that time, 23 years had passed since Tang Feifan’s death.
