Profound Inquiry Yields True Knowledge

Yanzi's Spring and Autumn Annals (Yanzi Chunqiu) contains the following passage: "Oranges grown south of the Huai River are oranges; grown north of the Huai they become trifoliate oranges. The leaves look alike, but the fruits taste different. Why? Because the water and soil differ."

This passage reveals some basic rules of biological heredity and variation, showing that Chinese people possessed remarkable insight in remote antiquity. Unfortunately, however, we lacked the spirit of deep inquiry, so the rules of biological heredity and variation had to be revealed by Mendel through experiment and statistical data two thousand years later.

Gregor Johann Mendel (July 20, 1822 – January 6, 1884) was a biologist and Augustinian priest. He was born in Heinzendorf, Silesia, in the Austrian Empire (now in the Czech Republic), and served as a priest at the monastery in Brunn (now Brno, Czech Republic). He is the founder of genetics and is honored as the father of modern genetics. Mendel's greatest contribution was the discovery of two of the three fundamental laws of genetics: the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment.

Mendel's parents were peasants, so he was skilled at horticulture. In October 1843 he arrived at the Brno monastery. He told the monks that he had no interest in religious faith but was full of longing for knowledge; he was deft with his hands, hardworking and steady, and had come to the monastery only to find shelter and a place to study. The monastery accepted him. At first he did odd jobs; on August 6, 1847 he was ordained a priest, and in his later years he even became abbot of the monastery.

Mendel was gentle and obedient by nature, meticulous and routine-bound, and the monastery life was quiet and uneventful. Yet here, in obscurity, Mendel carried out an experiment that changed the whole world—the famous pea experiment found in biology textbooks. Like the ancient Chinese, Mendel observed heredity and variation in pea plants. But unlike the ancient Chinese, who merely dipped into a subject and stopped, Father Mendel had a deeply inquisitive spirit and was determined to uncover the secrets of biological heredity and variation.

Mendel's path was rather rough. He did not wish to be a priest; he wanted to be a science teacher at the Brno experimental secondary school. To that end he spent two years in Vienna studying physics, chemistry, geography, botany, and zoology. Unfortunately, he failed the teacher certification examination twice.

Undeterred by these setbacks, Mendel never gave up his love of science and kept working on his pea experiments. He collected dozens of pea strains from nearby farms to cultivate, hoping to breed pure-breeding lines. During the trials he listed seven characters that bred true: 1. seed shape (round vs. wrinkled); 2. seed color (yellow vs. green); 3. flower color (white vs. purple); 4. flower position (terminal vs. axillary); 5. pod color (green vs. yellow); 6. pod shape (full vs. constricted); 7. plant height (tall vs. dwarf). Mendel found that each character appeared in at least two variants. Later biologists named the sequences controlling these variants alleles; sexually reproducing organisms inherit one allele from each parent, which we call "diploidy."

Mendel spent seven years studying the laws of heredity and variation in these peas. He crossed different strains, then crossed the hybrids again to see what would happen. He patiently kept records and subjected them to statistical analysis. The data showed that after hybrid hybrids were crossed, a given heritable trait appeared with a probability of one in four. At last Mendel uncovered the secret of heredity, discovering how genes from the paternal and maternal parents influence the offspring and their descendants. He worked out the widely observed laws of dominant and recessive inheritance, laying the foundation of modern biology.

Throughout his life Mendel was merely an "amateur scientist." When he took his astonishing findings to some of the most famous scientists of his day and asked them to look, he was met with the scornful laughter of arrogant academic scientists who thought he was simply making a fool of himself. As a result his papers could only be published in obscure journals of little influence, and his insights could only be shared with unknown people. Not until thirty years after Mendel's death did the world recognize his research, opening a new chapter in genetics. Mendel's contribution to genetics cannot be overstated; without it, agricultural scientists such as Yuan Longping, the father of hybrid rice, would never have achieved such monumental accomplishments.

Why, having already observed heredity and variation in Yanzi's Spring and Autumn Annals, did our ancestors fail to go one step further and, like Mendel, discover the fundamental laws of biological heredity? I would borrow a word from the historian Ray Huang: ancient Chinese people lacked the awareness and ability to administer the state by numbers. In fact, during the more than two thousand years of feudal dynasties, we lacked not only the awareness and ability to govern the state by numbers, but also the awareness and ability to conduct scientific research by numbers.

Our ancestors were too preoccupied with ethereal "comprehension" (wu xing). What they prized so highly as enlightenment was in fact a rather low-order form of thinking—comprehension combined with mysticism has misled countless people, ruining their precious lives. Comprehension is nothing more than human intuition; what one gropes to understand may be right or wrong. To judge whether what intuition has grasped is true or false requires the very spirit and ability Mendel showed—"verifying through numbers"—designing rigorous experiments and performing extensive statistical analysis. Many things people intuit out cannot withstand the test of data; only by repeatedly correcting their errors can people arrive at correct answers. Unless this low-order habit of learning by intuition is changed, it is very hard to penetrate the mysteries of nature.

By the mid-to-late Qing dynasty, China's educated class recognized this problem, and after being defeated and bullied they put forward the pragmatic idea of "learning the barbarians' techniques to control the barbarians," introducing the natural sciences of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. This active pursuit of change altered a mode of thought that had remained unchanged for thousands of years. There have always been sages who sought survival through reform; they are the backbone of our nation. The reason the Chinese nation has endured and flourished for five thousand years despite repeated setbacks has much to do with our ability to absorb foreign civilizations and turn them to our own use.

While studying TCM, I have deeply realized the same point. Ancient TCM was too fixated on the saying that "medicine is a matter of intuition"; it placed too much confidence in its own comprehension and lacked the spirit of deep inquiry and the courage to negate itself, so the overall level of TCM has always been hard to raise effectively.

When Emperor Zhezong of Song fell ill, all the imperial physicians and court officials with any medical knowledge offered remedies for the emperor's health; we can still read these records in the memorials of ministers such as Zeng Bu. Emperor Zhezong modestly listened to the opinions of the physicians and officials, trying one therapeutic approach today and another tomorrow; in the end he died of a lung disease in his twenties, and all the children born to him also died young.

Many among us nostalgically recall the era when there was no Western medicine, only TCM, believing that the arrival of Western medicine has brought disaster to the nation and harmed the Chinese people. They have not read history seriously. If they read history and saw that the medical care enjoyed by emperors was no better than this, they would probably not wish to live in the antiquity they once so envied.

For TCM to progress, it must emerge from a mode of thought that relies solely on intuition—from a primitive mode of thinking. It must use data to verify the medical principles intuited by the ancients and by ourselves, and continuously improve and refine. We certainly need to sharpen our intuition, but intuition alone is far from enough: we need data, we need comparative studies of the cost, benefit, and risk of different treatments, and we need to keep raising the success rate. Only with this spirit of profound inquiry and more thinking tools at our command can we create an even more brilliant future.