Word: liu
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...Edison Liu is a Hong Kong native who studied in the U.S. and eventually rose to become director of the division of clinical sciences at the National Cancer Institute. But in 2001 the government of Singapore made him an offer he couldn't refuse: the directorship of the brand new Genome Institute along with a $25 million starting budget--part of a $288 million integrated network of life-science research centers and biotech start-ups called Biopolis. Says Liu: "I came because I saw that the entire leadership of the country, the fabric of the country was thirsting for biology...
Singapore, meanwhile, with its Biopolis project, is pulling in top biomedical scientists--not just Edison Liu but Americans like geneticist Sydney Brenner and, most recently, husband-and-wife cancer researchers Neal Copeland and Nancy Jenkins, who are leaving the National Cancer Institute after two decades. They turned down competing offers from Stanford and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center because, Copeland says, "what's going on over there is amazing. There's plenty of funding and a lot less bureaucracy." Moreover, says Liu, "In the U.S. the state government says, Let's do one thing, while the Federal Government...
...Liu says his find demonstrates that Zheng He sailed around the world and returned to China by 1418 with precise knowledge not only of continental coastlines, but of interior geographic and cultural features, all of which appear on the map. But these details were well known in China by the time the map was supposedly drawn in the 18th century, argue critics such as Li Xiaocong, a cartography expert at Peking University. "It's simply not logical," says Li, "to use a map drawn in [Emperor] Qianlong's time to prove the existence of a map that might have been...
...Discovered America, a book that puts Zheng He's fleet on American shores seven decades ahead of Columbus. Published in 2002, this best seller mixes established fact with Menzies' own much-disputed interpretations of history. It was a Chinese edition of 1421 and subsequent e-mails with Menzies that Liu says convinced him of his map's significance. Menzies, who has helped publicize Liu's find, tells TIME: "There isn't one millionth of a 1% chance the map is a fake...
...Liu seems unfazed by such skepticism. Interviewed in his antique-filled Beijing office, he responds with a calm smile. "Just because we don't know what term was used for God, and have no evidence of a word having been used at a certain time, doesn't mean it wasn't used." He says "the Great Qing Sea" was the mapmaker's way of avoiding the taboo of appearing loyal to the previous dynasty. Liu has submitted a sample of the map for carbon dating, but has not yet received the results. Still, even if the bamboo paper...