Prompt: For many years, Prof. Chen Huanchun from HZAU, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, together with his team has helped to solve the problems of front-line production for farmers, earning the reputation as “the patron saint of farmers”. On January 13, Hubei News of Hubei Satellite TV covered the story of Chen Huanchun.
As a major country in animal husbandry, China is the world’s largest meat and egg producer for several years, but animal diseases are always threatening the industrial safety. Hubei province is abundant in talents, who in turn help the province prosper. Today, we come to know about Chen Huanchun, a scientist who is known as “the patron saint of farmers” and a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a professor from Huazhong Agricultural University.
At HZAU, Prof. Chen’s team is providing clinical diagnostic services to farmers thousands of miles away via a remote video diagnosis platform. No matter how busy he is, Prof. Chen asks himself and his team to persist in solving the problems of front-line production for the farmers.
Prof. Chen said, “I usually got to the laboratory at about 7:10 or 7: 20 in the morning back then. Chicken and pig farmers from the surrounding countryside, like Xiaogang and Huanggang, usually came early in the morning and stood in line outside.”
Xu Gaoyuan, Prof. Chen’s student, said: “whether it is a pig farm with 10000 pigs or a small farmer who raises a few pigs, he has always been on the front line to solve problems for them, and thus is acclaimed as the the ‘patron saint’ by the grateful farmers.”
Prof. Chen, when working in the front line, developed the belief that scientific research should solve front-line problems. Born into a rural family in 1972, he just graduated from Huazhong Agricultural University majoring in animal husbandry and veterinary medicine. During his internship in Tianmen, he saw a large number of local cattle die of diarrhoeal disease and farmers have to plow by themselves.
“It is very laborious for people to plow, and a family has to work for many days to plow one mu of land (666.67 sq m). Back then, I have always felt that diarrhoeal disease is very harmful, so I made up my mind to do a good job in the research of livestock infectious diseases to free farmers from this kind of suffering,” according to Prof. Chen.
The commitment to freeing farmers from suffering inspired Chen Huanchun to grow up all the way. In 1984, He gave up the high salary and superior scientific research environment at the University of Munich in Germany and returned to a research laboratory of HZAU without water, electricity and even a piece of scientific research equipment.
“When I came back at that time, the equipment was very scarce. I went to the abandoned warehouse to see if I could find something that could come in handy,” Prof. Chen recalled.
In this way, the laboratory was set up from the scratch. In the early 1990s, the pig farming industry in Jianghan Plain encountered unknown diseases, and a large number of pigs died suddenly. Then, Mr. Chen spent every day working in the laboratory and pigsty every day. After countless failures and repeated research, he finally found out the main culprit—pseudorabies virus, and quickly developed a vaccine.
“Pseudorabies (at the time) was the number one killer in Western farming,” Chen said. “But the gene-deficient vaccine we developed was unexpectedly effective. When jabbed in the morning, it immediately worked in the afternoon; when jabbed in the afternoon, it worked the next day.”
These vaccines are urgently needed by farmers, but they were not available at home in the past, and foreign vaccines are also very expensive. Our vaccines are much cheaper than those foreign vaccines and have been widely used, Xu Gaoyuan noted.
Since then, Prof. Chen Huanchun and his team have successively developed many kinds of vaccines against porcine orchid disease and porcine streptococcosis. They also won the second prize for State Science and Technology Award and made major breakthroughs in fighting against major zoonotic diseases such as animal influenza and animal tuberculosis. Despite his remarkable achievements, Chen Huanchun found that there was still a problem: technology and equipment could not match with the vaccine production. Therefore he decided to produce vaccines by himself. Prof. Chen led a team to establish Wuhan KeQian Biology CO., Ltd. in 2001, working as an innovation center and conducting vaccine production at the same time. Today, the company has been public, with its four products ranking first in the national market.
Finally, Prof. Chen concluded that the Chinese people should hold the rice bowl in their own hands, and focus on both basic research and applied research to beef up innovation and make better products. As such, we will certainly transform from a major manufacturing country to a manufacturing power.
Source: http://news.hzau.edu.cn/2022/0113/62503.shtml
Translated by: Zhang Jiefeng
Supervised by: Jin Bei
