On the afternoon of September 15, Professor Zijian Guo, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, gave an online lecture on “Combination of Chemistry and Biomedicine: Chemical Elements and Health” to students of Kuang Yaming Honors School.
Starting with the Healthy China 2030 Initiative, Professor Guo pointed out that combining chemistry and biomedicine highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity. The lecture consists of four parts.
In the first part, Professor Guo mentioned some medical breakthroughs in history, including Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin and Youyou Tu's discovery of artemisinin, to encourage the students to keep their feet on the ground and take action instead of empty talk. Then, he showed the 2002-2022 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry to prove that interdisciplinarity contributed to scientific breakthroughs and has become an irreplaceable paradigm in scientific research. Last, he introduced chemical biology, particularly metallic chemical biology, on which his research focuses.
In the second part, Professor Guo introduced some elements and their biological functions, including some common elements, relationships between ionic concentration and organisms' response, organisms’ “control” over metal ions, concentrations of free ions inside and outside cells, and diseases related to elemental amounts.
In the third part, Professor Guo emphasized that metallic elements are essential to health, so he mentioned the functions of trace elements, iron contents in daily food, the metabolism of iron, methane monooxygenase, and enzymes related to nitrogen metabolism.
In the fourth part, he focused on metallic elements in medical applications, including magnetic resonance imaging, medicine for radio-diagnosis (made of technetium), lithium carbonate and the treatment of manic-depressive psychosis, the discovery of cisplatin as antineoplastics, etc.
After the lecture, Professor Guo answered questions from the students.Through this wonderful lecture, the students learned about cutting-edge knowledge of biology and chemistry and the importance of interdisciplinarity.
