It took more than two weeks for them to reach Wu Han. Already, the war with Japan was tearing China apart, and air raids from Japanese aircraft had become common as the young man and his wife fled west from the smaller town of Wan Zhi of Anhei province and arrived at a British hospital for the birth of their child.

The hospital staff had painted a huge Union Jack on the hospital’s roof, but attacks were under way when the baby was born on March 8, 1938. As the baby cried, the windows in the hospital rattled from the explosions throughout the town.

The delivery went well, and the parents had their second child, whom they named Bi-Cheng, but their happiness was tempered by the roar of war. With a 20-month-old daughter already in tow, the Wang family must have wondered if it would ever return to the father’s paper and stationery shop in Wan Zhi. A war that would, in one form or another last more than a decade, was tearing China apart.

The baby born that morning of war, known universally now as B.C. and an American citizen since 1972, sits comfortably in his South Campus office. He is a small man whose sincerity may be his most attractive feature. He seems perpetually grateful, even amazed, at how life led him from that scene of terror as an infant to preeminence as one of the world’s finest X-ray crystallographers.

He is as kind as he is brilliant, but his modesty would never allow him to speak of such things. His childhood was one of constant movement through the terrors of the Sino-Japanese War and then World War II, of close escapes and difficult choices. But he came through it all stronger, deeply interested in science, and with convictions that have attracted some of America’s best and brightest researchers into his orbit. He may be Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UGA, but that’s not what you remember when you get to know him. What you recall is his gentleness, gratitude, and intense devotion to his family and his work.

“Professor Wang has, in just one decade, elevated the University of Georgia to its current status as an internationally known center for research in protein structural genomics,” says David Puett, Regents Professor and head of the department of biochemistry and molecular biology. “A delightful colleague, he has shown tireless dedication and commitment to research, education, mentoring, service, and economic development for the university and state. We are extraordinarily pleased that he accepted the challenges presented here, and his success has greatly exceeded our expectations, that were high to begin with.”

His pioneering work in protein structure determination, and particularly his development of high-throughput techniques for structural genomics, has contributed enormously to the current proteomics era, following the genomics era in biology.

Wang’s work could hardly be more important, since knowing a protein’s physical attributes—what it actually looks like—helps scientists understand how it functions in relation to other molecules in the cell.
That he has risen to such international prominence is remarkable. That it came about during the darkest days of war in Asia make the story nearly unbelievable.

B.C.’s father had inherited the family business in Wan Zhi, a store that sold paper goods, everything from stationery to paper for accounting or other daily uses. With the usual Chinese attention to art, much of the stock was elegant and decorative, but Mr. Wang had higher aspirations: All his life, he had wanted to be a teacher.

Because the business and the family were prosperous, the elder Wang used his earnings to open a school. But with the outbreak of war and the uncertainty of business, the family began to move somewhat frequently, on an odyssey that would lead their son to science and themselves, several times, nearly to disaster.

The time was right for both parents to extend their education. After his father earned a chemical engineering degree in papermaking and his mother a degree in accounting, the family faced the hardship of having to choose between the cities in which each of his parents worked.

B.C. and his elder sister therefore remained with their mother while their father worked in a town 200 miles away. They rarely saw him.

World War II, meanwhile, exploded in Asia after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and Wang can to this day remember the terror of seeing Japanese fighter pilots overflying the town near Chunking, where they lived.

“When we heard the [air raid warning] sirens, we always had to run for cover,” he says in his soft, accented English. “Usually, when the siren sounded long twice, that meant the air raid was over. But one day, the siren rang for a long time, and we found out that the war was over. I was so happy. That night, we did not go to bed early, and everyone was so excited.”

B.C. was seven years old.

They briefly visited their ancestral home of Wan Zhi, but they found it utterly changed, with people living in their family home. Already, the changes that would lead to the Communist takeover of China three years later were underway. The father had two job options hanging, one in Manchuria and another in Taiwan, but word was late coming from Manchuria, so he packed the family off to Taiwan, a decision that would radically change B.C. Wang’s life.

Because Taiwan had a strong pulp and paper industry, the elder Wang was needed there, and, at first, all went well for the young family. It was good to be back together. Unfortunately, the togetherness lasted only a short time before the parents found themselves, yet again, working in different cities. B.C., his mother and sister moved to the northern part of Taiwan, while his father lived in a distant city.

Unknown to the family, however, Taiwan was about to explode. During the so-called “Taiwan Uprising” of 1947 gangs began randomly killing anyone from mainland China.

“We heard they were coming for us, but my mother worked in this gold mine company’s office, and so we all ran and hid with the director of the hospital for that company,” says Wang. “While we were hiding in a closet, there was a gun battle outside. We hid there for a week.”

Finally, having had enough, Chiang Kai-Shek moved his army to Taiwan to quell the rebellion. But a much greater challenge was brewing on the mainland, and B.C. was surprised to find, later, that his school on Taiwan had been the center of a Communist spy ring. They managed to visit Wan Zhi on the mainland one last time before the country fell to Mao Zedong and, indeed, were on the last train to leave Wan Zhi for Shanghai.

Arriving in Shanghai, they took a cargo ship back to Taiwan.
There, in freedom, he grew up, graduated from high school, and earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1960. Sensing a chance to broaden his horizons, he came to America for the first time and, in 1968, finished his doctoral degree in chemistry from the University of Arkansas. While there, he also met and married Johnna Elliott in 1967, and they are now the parents of two grown children, Tony and Andy. They also have three grandchildren.

After a postdoctoral fellowship at Cal Tech from 1968 to 1970, Wang moved to Pittsburgh, where he was to remain for many years, first with the VA Medical Center and then with the University of Pittsburgh, where he rose through the ranks to become a professor in the departments of crystallography and biological sciences. He came to the University of Georgia in 1995.

Wang is one of the world’s experts in X-ray crystallography, but while the technique is common in science, it isn’t well known to the public. It basically uses X-rays to bombard crystals, in this case, proteins that have been grown as crystals, then captures their interference patterns on light-sensitive detection material. Researchers then analyze these patterns with high-speed computers that draw amazingly accurate pictures of molecular structures.

The Georgia X-Ray Crystallo-graphy Laboratory (GXRCC) at UGA is one of the most advanced academic X-ray crystallography laboratories in the world in terms of both availability of state-of-the-art equipment and new technology development. In collaboration with the Southeast Regional Collaborative Access Team (SER-CAT), GXRCC was part of the construction of two synchrotron beamlines at the Advance Photon Source (APS) at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The GXRCC administers the SER-CAT program and operates the SER-CAT facility at the APS. GXRCC is also the home research site for the Southeast Collaboratory for Structural Genomics. Wang is the center’s director.

X-ray crystallography has become crucial in science, and Wang’s presence has made UGA an international leader in the field.

Once they know a molecule’s structure based on X-ray crystallography, scientists can better predict how the molecule works—whether its job is to copy the genetic information from DNA, turn genes off or on, speed up chemical reactions, identify viruses or other foreign substances, or simply cart materials in and out of the cell. Knowing the three-dimensional structure of a protein also can help explain how it identifies a precise sequence on a strand of DNA. This kind of information helps advance science on many fronts: genetics, medicine, and drug design, to name a few.

“It is important to know a protein molecule’s structure because it will show you how it will function physically,” Wang says. “Anything that functions in nature has something to do with its structure. It will function a certain way because it has a certain structure. This applies to everything. And once we understand a structure we can control its function.”

Because molecules in a crystal are aligned in an orderly fashion, they yield very predictable interference or diffraction patterns that are related to the spacing of atoms in the molecule and therefore are unique to the crystal’s structure. For instance, X-ray crystallography can help explain everything from how a drug can be designed to be more effective in the human body to why diamond crystals are extremely hard while salt crystals dissolve in water.

“The magnification of X-ray crystallography is considerably greater than electron microscopy or any other technique currently available,” Wang says. “We can determine resolution in terms of two or three angstroms, and that enables us to study large biological molecules like proteins, DNA, and viruses.”

His colleagues at UGA agree.

“Only on special occasions can we actually get data to the resolution that we can see individual atoms. But we can see the gross shape of each amino acid in the protein,” says John Rose, a UGA associate research biochemist, now associate professor, who has worked with Wang for many years.

In 1993, while still on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh, Wang was the senior researcher who determined the crystal structure of an RNA polymerase isolated from a virus.

A good protein crystal for X-ray crystallography has a very orderly molecular arrangement, which increases the resolution and provides a much better picture of its structure.

B.C. Wang’s phone keeps ringing. He’s due in Japan in three days, and he’s still making plans. The distance between points of a crystal may be tiny, but in a sense they are as vast as the distance from war-torn China to Athens, Ga. That may, in fact, be one of Wang’s greatest gifts: closing distances. His encyclopedic mind and his genuine warmth keep ideas fresh and admirers close.

(Note: Portions of this story have been adapted and edited from a story in the Winter 1997 Research Magazine at UGA, written by its editor, Judith Bolyard Purdy.)