On the morning of July 2, the Unveiling Ceremony of the China office of the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) and Symposium on Biochemistry and Molecular Biology was held in Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences (GIBH). The unveiling ceremony was chaired by Duanquing Pei, Deputy Director General of GIBH. Mr. Xian-Min Ma, Deputy Director of the Department of Science & Technology of Guangdong Province; Professor Heidi Hamm, President of ASBMB and Chair of the Pharmacology Department, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tenn.; Professor Guang-Mei Yan, Vice President of Sun Yat-sen University as well as many other researchers attended the ceremony.
Founded in 1906, ASBMB is a nonprofit scientific and educational organization with over 11,900 members registered all over the world. ASBMB’s mission is to promote biochemistry and molecular biology by publications such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the Journal of Lipid Research, and Molecular and Cellular Proteomics; hosting scientific meetings; sponsoring fundamental research and education; etc.
The China office of the society is the only ASBMB agency outside the United States. The main responsibility of ASBMB China is to publish some selected articles from ASBMB journals which are of particular value to scientists in Asia. Each article that appears in the compendium will be published with a commentary by a prominent Asian scientist. Some of the articles will be given a special report in “ASBMB Today”.
At the unveiling ceremony, Mr. Xian-Min Ma, Deputy Director of Department of Science & Technology of Guangdong Province, expressed his expectations that collaborations among researchers and scientists of Guangdong in the field of life sciences should be greatly strengthened, so that the scientists could be inspired to make more contributions to the discipline. Meanwhile, Mr. Ma also hoped that ASBMB China office would be a good platform for the researchers and scientists to present their research achievements in the field.
Also present at the ceremony were Alma L. Burlingame, Co-Editor of the journal Molecular and Cellular Proteomics and Professor of Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco; William L. Smith, Associate Editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry and Professor and Chair of Biological Chemistry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and Xiao-Fan Wang, Associate Editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry and Professor of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology at Duke University, Durham, N.C; and Barbara Gordon, Executive Director of ASBMB.
The ASBMB China office will provide an opportunity and a platform of a higher stage for scientific exchanges in the field of life sciences, and will promote the dialogues between ASBMB and the scientists in Asia and China.
