TA-YOU WU was born into a family of scholars on September 29, 1907 in Canton, China. His grandfather had achieved chin shih, the highest degree in the imperial examination system, and had won election to the Imperial Hanlin Academy in Peking, the highest academic honor a scholar could attain. His father, Wu Kwoh-chi was a chu jen (second degree) scholar, as was his eldest uncle, and both young men were in government service.

When he was five his father, who had earlier been an attaché of the Chinese embassy in the Philippines, was posted as a hsien (county) magistrate to Manchuria. His mother, Kuan Kia-er, took TA-YOU, her only living child, and settled in Tientsin to be relatively near her husband. Wu Kwoh-chi died during a plague epidemic two years later and mother and child returned to the family home in Canton in the south. When WU was seven they again went to Tientsin to stay for two years with his father's eldest brother, and head of the family, after which the whole family returned to Canton where they resided until the boy was 14.

The pivotal influence in WU's early years was his mother. He and a cousin, two years younger, were the only children in the Canton household. Lacking the active companionship of others his own age, WU developed a love for study that was in keeping with his mother's desire for him to follow in the family scholarly tradition.

In public elementary school he began to read Chinese classics and by the fifth and sixth grades he was reading traditional novels like Monkey and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. His worst marks in those years were in arithmetic. Even his hobbies were not of a mathematical or scientific bent, but were, in true scholar tradition, carving chops (name seals) and painting landscapes. His Chinese calligraphy and his English script were equally good. He regularly received certificates for perfect behavior, and since his mother felt school should be exclusively for study (and he was small in stature), he never participated in sports. His only exercise was walking to and from the schoolgrounds.

Beside grades, which in his case were not particularly good, a requirement for each sixth grade student taking the examinations for entry into junior high school was to write the names of his ancestors for three generations. WU believes that had his grandfather not been a han lin and his father a chu jen he would not have passed into the upper school, but he adds, "at that time nobody thought this system was unfair."

In his first year in junior high, in addition to the usual arithmetic, history, geography, English and a "modem class" in bookkeeping, he studied the Chinese classic Chun Chiu Tsuo Chuan (Spring and Autumn Annals) and stood first in his class by the end of the year. The following year WU's uncle resumed to Tientsin to head a secondary school organized by the large Cantonese colony there. He took with him his own two sons, WU, and his younger nephew, because he believed that the four boys would receive better training in Tientsin than in Canton—not at the small school he would head, but at Nankai which was considered one of the best high schools in China. Its principal, Chang Poling, was a highly regarded educator whose singular devotion to education had attracted to his schools (kindergarten through university) a concentration of outstanding professors and scholars.

Although they were attending a private school, the four cousins had little money to spend. WU recalls that they arrived with only one pair of gym shoes among them, so that if two were on the soccer field at the same time, one wore the right shoe and the other the left—with ordinary shoes on the other feet.

Both Nankai High School where WU completed his remaining years of junior and senior high school (1921-1925) and Nankai University where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree (1929) were conducted in a conservative, disciplined atmosphere which he believes was good for him. Classes and dormitories were strictly regimented. Smoking was not allowed. Silence was enforced during the evening study period and only between 9:30 and 10 p.m. could students do whatever they liked—before lights were turned off and silence was again enforced. WU found the emphasis on study congenial and "the most worthwhile target of life seemed to be achieving some sort of fame and position in the academic world." By this time he had chosen mathematics and science as his fields of endeavor.

WU entered the university by taking the entrance examination at the end of his next to last year of high school, and taught himself advanced chemistry during the summer. In his first year he enrolled in the College of Mining Engineering where his courses included calculus, chemistry and advanced physics. When the college was discontinued at the end of the year because of lack of financial support, WU transferred to the College of Science where he had the choice of majoring in chemistry, mathematics, biology or physics. Although he had missed and not made up his last year of high school physics, and the subject was taught by a professor who inspired awe, he "felt a little bit challenged" to choose a physics major. The fearsome professor, moreover, proved to be a poor lecturer, which forced WU to work hard. As a result of this experience he later advised his own students not to rely too much on their teachers, but to try to learn and understand by their own efforts.

Following his graduation WU remained at Nankai University for two years as an instructor. In 1931 he applied for and received a research fellowship from the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture, which administered the United States Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Fund that had been set aside for educational aid to China. WU did not know one American university from another and, with his physics professor on furlough, he had no one to turn to for advice. After studying a number of school bulletins in the university library he ultimately chose the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor on the basis of cost. He had never regretted his choice since Michigan proved to have a strong physics department.

The university also was generous; because he held a China Foundation fellowship he was exempted from tuition. ("I paid nothing except for football game tickets [an athletic fee]," he recalls with a quick smile.) As he had taken more advanced courses than his American counterparts, WU was able to complete his Master of Science in June 1932. Without a fellowship for 1932-33 he secured a part-time summer assistantship in the physics department doing what he calls "hard labor" on some research projects. He remembers in particular working three consecutive nights from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. taking readings every minute from two machines—1,200 readings in 10 hours! During the day he audited the university's celebrated summer symposium which drew physicists from around the country to hear such famed lecturers as Werner Heisenberg of Germany and the Russian-born American Gregory Breit. WU missed none of the lectures, but sometimes could not stay awake.

The university again exempted him from paying tuition the following year. He managed to finish his doctoral thesis and get his Ph.D. in June 1933, something of a record, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi honorary scholarship fraternities. The extension of his China Foundation fellowship in 1933-34 enabled him to spend a year in postdoctoral study and research, at the end of which he returned to China to take up a professorship in physics at Peking National University, the country's leading government institution of higher learning.

WU had met his wife-to-be, Kuan-shih Yuan, when he was a senior and she a freshman at Nankai University. When WU received his fellowship in 1931 she had secured a scholarship to Elmira College, a girls' school in New York state, and they traveled together with other students by ship to the United States. A year later she transferred to the University of Michigan where she earned her bachelor's degree. She then spent a year under treatment for tuberculosis at a sanitarium in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York before returning to China in 1935. The WUs were married in September 1936 in Peking.

In 1937, as Japanese troops moved on Peking and Tientsin, Peking National, Tsing Hua and Nankai universities transferred to a temporary refugee campus in Changsha, Hunan. At this time the Sino-British Boxer Indemnity Fund Foundation offered WU a chair at Szechuan University in Chengtu, Szechuan. Because Changsha was near the war front and his wife was in delicate health, friends advised him to accept the chair at Szechuan University where he taught from November 1937 until June 1938. He then joined his colleagues from Peking in Kunming, Yunnan, where Peking National, Tsing Hua and Nankai universities had formed Hsi Nan Lien Ho Ta Hsueh (Southwestern Associated University), known as Lien Ta. He remained there as a Professor of Physics until the end of the war.

In 1938 WU wrote his first book, Vibrational Spectra and Structure of Polyatomic Molecules. Lacking secretarial and printing facilities in Kunming, he prepared the many graphs and tables himself, typed the manuscript with two fingers and sent it to Shanghai in 1939 where the manager of the National University of Peking Press arranged for it to be printed. This book surprised his colleagues everywhere—who wondered how he could have produced it under wartime conditions—and it gained him considerable fame. The first on the subject of molecular spectroscopy, it was for many years one of the best read texts in the field. It won him the 1939 Ting Memorial Prize of the Academia Sinica (China's highest scientific research institution) and was included in the Physics Series published in the United States by Prentice-Hall in 1940 and later reprinted, in a second edition with supplementary notes, by Edward Bros. of Ann Arbor, Michigan, under the Alien Property Act.

During the next few years, as costs rose steadily in Kunming, the WUs were among the fortunate few who could still afford a maid-cook. Though WU himself did not play bridge, it became a popular pastime for friends to play at their home and for the losers to pay for the ingredients of the dinner prepared by their cook. Air raids became frequent in the fall of 1940 but the WUs did not leave the Lien Ta campus until their home was reduced to shambles in late 1940. Then, with their maid and her son, they moved into a small room in a compound five kilometers distant which was provided by Peking University for faculty who had been bombed out. They lived that way until the winter of 1944 when Lien Ta provided them with a three-room house.

Until the end of 1942 when the American Flying Tigers (later U.S. 14th Airforce) kept Japanese planes away from Kunming, classes were held in the early morning so that students and faculty could disperse before the daily bombing began. WU had to walk the five kilometers to campus and was always tired. His shoes wore out quickly on the pebbled road and his socks even sooner. He had only one pair of patched khaki trousers, but no one's apparel caused comment; frugality was the norm. To supplement his meager wartime salary, he at one time unsuccessfully tried raising piglets.

WU had shared the 1939 Ting Memorial Prize money with two needy friends, who returned it when they learned of his wife's hospitalization in 1943. Mrs. WU's gold bracelets and rings had to be sold as well to pay for her medical care.

As prices climbed ever higher in the spring of 1945 WU had to let the maid go and, with his wife still in frail health, take over the buying and preparation of food. Each morning he set out with a basket and a weight measure, and after class went to market. He remembers one time bringing home two fish, putting them in a pan of water and turning back after a moment to find one of them taken by a crow—they were that small! His cooking became quite good but he was unable to master lighting a charcoal fire. Nevertheless, despite the hazards, hardships and uncertainties of the war years in Kunming, both faculty and students maintained good academic standards.

From 1943 to 1946 WU held a concurrent appointment as Research Associate in the Institute of Astronomy of the Academia Sinica. He was selected on the basis of work on the solar corona during an eclipse which he had done at Michigan with Samuel Goudsmit, his doctoral thesis advisor. Although, as WU says, the theory they proposed later proved to be "irrelevant," it established his connection with astronomy.

Following the explosion of atomic bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945, WU and a colleague from Lien Ta were called to Chungking (the wartime capital) to discuss developing an atom bomb in China. In extensive talks with Chen Cheng, minister of what later became the defense department, the academicians firmly maintained that scientific development must be undertaken in a basic, long range fashion; that it would be futile to pour money into such an advanced project. Chen was disappointed, for "like military men he wanted something done right away," but he ultimately accepted their proposal to start the program by picking out a few promising young men and giving them good basic education abroad. "After a lot of red tape," WU reports, "we finally got this going in the summer of 1946 and shipped out five young students—two physicists, two chemists and one mathematician." Of the five, two stayed in the "free world," one of whom, Lee Tsung-dao, shared the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics; and three returned to the mainland to be active in atomic research and academic achievement under the communists.

Immediately after the Japanese surrender in August 1945 costs skyrocketed and inflation became rampant. Like other refugees the WUs sold their possessions to get money for their fares back to the coast. When they left Kunming the following year all of their worldly goods could be carried in two suitcases.

With the end of World War II the conflict that began in the 1920s between the Kuomintang (Nationalists) and Communists flamed into civil war. WU therefore welcomed a mission to the United States to monitor the progress of the five students he had helped send abroad, observe scientific methodology that might be adaptable to China, and undertake some research on his own as a Visiting Professor of Physics at Michigan. At Michigan he found that writing a book on the structure of molecules had exhausted his interest in atomic and molecular physics. He is grateful for the support of Prof. Isaac Rabi in changing fields. Transferring to Columbia University he elected to investigate experimental physics. Concurrently for one year (1948-49) he taught quantum mechanics at the uptown campus of New York University. Also in 1948 he was recognized in China for his academic achievements by election in absentia to the Academia Sinica.

In 1949 when his mission abroad was supposed to end the Nationalist government was in a state of collapse and in the process of leaving the mainland for the island of Taiwan. With a program for long-range science development thus out of the question, WU accepted the invitation to be Principal Research Officer and to organize and head a new Theoretical Physics Section of the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa. He believes Prof. Rabi recommended him as the type of broadgauged physicist the Council was looking for.

Before the war this government council had supported applied science to benefit industry, but the visionary chemist E. W. R. Steacie, who became Vice-President and effective executive in 1949, proposed broadening its parameters by not filling the some 300 vacancies with permanent appointments and instead converting them to postdoctoral fellowships open to scientists in all fields worldwide. WU was one of the few permanent personnel. The Council's atmosphere was more or less academic and his main responsibilities were to choose and generally look after the postdoctoral fellows. In consequence of his unstructured duties he was able to take periodic leaves to lecture abroad.

Although Canada was not strong in science at the time WU joined the Council, the fellowships quickly attracted highly trained applicants from wartorn Europe and Japan, from India and elsewhere. One result of the program was the stimulation of scientific research at Canadian universities, particularly Toronto, McGill and British Columbia. Another was that when WU travels abroad former fellows see to it that his visits are professionally productive.

Contributing to the satisfaction of WU's years in Canada was the "miraculous improvement" in Mrs. WU's health in 1950 after they adopted the one-year-old son of WU's younger cousin living in Hong Kong. Mrs. WU from then on devoted her energy to the precocious boy—who qualified to enter the University of California at Berkeley at the age of 14.

From November 1956 to April 1957 WU took leave from the Council to accept the position of visiting professor, established by the China Foundation, at National Taiwan (Tai Ta) and National Tsing Hua universities in Taipei. The Tsing Hua campus had not yet been built but the university had started an Institute of Atomic Sciences, with a first-year enrollment of 20 students who attended classes at Tai Ta. Soon after he arrived in Taiwan WU was awarded the Medal of Special Merits (for Scientific Research) by the Ministry of Education.

This visit alerted WU to the urgent need for a plan to develop science on Taiwan such as he had earlier envisaged for the mainland. He found that very few scientists had followed the Republic of China (ROC) government to Taiwan, with the exception of the highly trained specialists in agriculture, irrigation engineering and public health who came with the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction and were guiding a transformation of the agricultural economy. A great contribution to higher learning in the humanities was being made by members of the Academia Sinica's Institute of Philology and History, which had moved to Taiwan more or less intact; they doubled as faculty and brought up the present generation of scholars in those fields. The Institute of Mathematics also was able to move its library from the mainland to Taiwan during the hectic period in 1949.

Deeply concerned by the sparsity of teachers and researchers, WU was instrumental in convening the first meeting of the decisionmaking council of the Academia Sinica since 1948. Although the majority of the 80 elected members were still on the mainland, with only five or six in Taiwan, a quota was achieved "by a sort of artifice," WU recalls. Announcements were carried in newspapers around the world that those who registered by mail would be counted, and 20 or so living in the United States and elsewhere responded. At the April 1957 meeting WU moved the Academia point out to the government that, "no matter how poor we are we must face the fact that we must have some sort of long-range program for developing not only science but hsueh shu [scholarship] in general." The motion was accepted and transmitted to the authorities where it met with no response.

On his return to the United States WU reported to the head of the China Foundation, Hu Shih, on the sorry state of scholarship in Taiwan, but of the enthusiasm with which students had received his lectures. Impressed by his account, Hu, when he went back to the ROC as president of the Academia in 1958, asked WU to write a proposal for some serious science programs for the government to consider. Using his proposal as a basis for discussion, Hu won government approval in 1959 to form the Committee for the Long-Range Development of Science, of which the president of the Academia would be chairman and the Minister of Education deputy chairman. Since there was no money in the budget for the committee, the government set aside a percentage of the profits from the wine and tobacco monopoly that provided between 30 and 50 million New Taiwan Dollars (NT$, then equivalent to US$832,000 to US$1.4 million) a year. The United States Agency for International Development, normally confined to helping only agriculture and industry, made an exception and allotted funds for the projected program of basic science education and research, but the total of local and foreign aid funds was too small to make more than a beginning.

WU took a second leave from the Research Council (1958-59) to spend an academic year from September through May at Princeton University as a member of the Institute of Advanced Study. The association with learned fellow members and guest speakers, and access to university library and gatherings, was a time of stimulating discussion, reading and reflection. (In the woods on the campus Prof. Paul Dirac from Cambridge University, England, taught him how to chop wood! )

Another prestigious invitation followed in 1960-61—to be Visiting Professor at the Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique (Swiss National Science Foundation) at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Since he had no fixed duties at the Council and the program was running smoothly, leave was again readily granted. WU did not speak French but wrote out his lectures in English, had them mimeographed and distributed, and addressed the classes in English which the advanced students understood enough to follow from the mimeographed texts.

During his 14 years with the Research Council WU's academic reputation was also enhanced by the publication of some 50 research papers. And in 1959 he and T. Ohmura, a postdoctoral fellow from Japan, coauthored a book, Quantum Theory of Scattering, which was published in 1962 and later translated into Russian.

In 1963 the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, New York, asked WU to join its faculty at the behest of its very active aerodynamics professor Antonio Ferri, who had gotten grants from the defense department and other federal agencies to build up a graduate school; he wanted an all-around physics professor. The Research Council program for which WU had been responsible was well established, he had served long enough to take early retirement and he was ready for a change. This change, however, proved to be uncongenial; finding the Polytechnic Institute fraught with intense internal politics, he resigned after two years.

Offered positions at universities in Oregon, Ohio and New York, WU chose the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo where future prospects seemed brightest. When this originally private university had been taken into the state system, Governor Nelson Rockefeller had committed US$650 million to it for a building program, and there were plans for a corresponding academic expansion. Though political and economic changes resulted in cutbacks and delays in appropriations (and the new campus is not yet completed), WU served as chairman of the Physics Department for three years and remained as a professor for another ten years. He built a departmental foundation in theoretical physics, which he expanded into experimental physics as the funds necessary for such work became available.

Meanwhile the social turmoil in mainland China, set off in 1966 by the start of the Cultural Revolution, prompted ROC President Chiang Kai-shek to exercise the power provided under the constitution for emergencies and form a National Security Council. This "super cabinet" reported directly to the president, who transmitted policy recommendations of which he approved to the Executive Yuan for implementation—without reference to the Legislative Yuan with whose red tape and long delays Chiang had lost patience. Among the several committees of the National Security Council was the Advisory Committee for Science Development which Chiang, in the spring of 1967, asked WU to head. WU replied that his career had been entirely academic, he had neither the interest nor the experience for such a position, and that he was temperamentally unsuited to a political job. He offered, however, to contribute suggestions for a general science buildup.

Asked to come to Taiwan to discuss the matter, WU found on his brief visit that the president was adamant. WU added to his earlier reasons for declining the appointment, that he had a commitment to SUNY which he could not in good conscience break. He remembers the president's answer: "You will take this position. If you cannot settle down here permanently, you can come whenever you are able, and in your absence you will have colleagues who will help you." By colleagues Chiang meant Chien Shih-liang, president of Tai Ta, and Minister of Education Yen Cheng-hsing. WU did not know Yen well but Chien was his oldest friend in Taiwan: they had been high school classmates, as graduate students had traveled on the same ship to the United States, and both had returned to teach at Peking University. "Then I had to accept," WU says, "I could not very well refuse such generous considerations."

WU was given the same pay as a minister—at that time the equivalent of about US$400 per month including allowances, plus living quarters and a car—but the remuneration did not matter to him. "I was responding to a sense of identity, not just with Taiwan but with the Chinese people, and when it was a question of starting a science program, of course I had ideas."

During his summer vacation in 1967 WU returned to Taiwan. He came again in December, and every year thereafter (until his retirement from SUNY in 1978) he spent the semester breaks from late May through early September, and from December through mid-January in Taipei, overseeing one phase or another of science development.

From the outset Chiang accepted WU's basic principle that defense, industrial and academic research remain separated: atomic or nuclear energy projects continued to be the responsibility of the Department of Defense or the Atomic Energy Commission, and industrial and applied research of the Ministry of Economic Affairs. Nevertheless, WU made a proposal in the field of economic affairs which the government implemented: that all public enterprises—e.g., Taiwan Power, China Petroleum—be allowed to retain from one to two percent of their gross income for research and development. The public corporations took advantage of this allowance but only the Directory of Telecommunications developed a research institute which, "by today's standard it did not do too well," WU reports ruefully. He still thinks it a good idea but blames the Ministry of Economic Affairs for not insisting on compliance.

Another of WU's early recommendations proved effective. He suggested limiting all academic administrative appointments to three-year terms renewable once only, and requiring relinquishment of academic chairmanships at age 65. These new rules, designed to prevent stagnancy and weed out incompetency, have solved some of the problems of modernizing institutes and universities.

The president also accepted WU's proposal to reorganize the Committee for Long-Range Development of Science—which had neither authority nor sufficient dependable funding—into the National Science Council (NSC), under the Executive Yuan and supported directly by the government with an ample annual budget. WU urged that the chairman be recommended by the Advisory Committee on Scientific Development. The president, in turn, suggested that it would be simpler and more efficient if WU himself took the job. WU agreed to do so, and from 1967 to 1973 he concurrently chaired the Advisory Committee and the NSC. The budget of the latter was the equivalent of US$10 million the first year. By 1984 it had tripled.

With persistence and patience WU organized the NSC, establishing an effective planning procedure and persuading colleagues that a plan is irrelevant unless all aspects are constantly, carefully and realistically weighed and its operating success regularly verified. Even now, 11 years after he retired, the National Science Development Plan, drawn up under his guidance in 1967, is still being followed and his planning methodology is widely practiced.

The first chapter of the master plan set general guidelines, the second established a 12-year time frame for implementation and accomplishment of the plan (an arbitrary length of time chosen only to satisfy fellow planners), and the third defined the systems for science education and development of scientific manpower. The remaining eight chapters were devoted to specific aspects of research planning in: 1) basic science, 2) humanities and social sciences, 3) applied science and industrial technology, 4) agricultural science, 5) communications and transportation, 6) atomic energy, 7) medicine and 8) public health.

The first concern of the NSC under the 12-year plan was to assess science and technology courses in the universities and upgrade the level of instruction. A furlough program was developed to give junior members at universities and research institutes who had not had the chance to study for doctoral degrees two-years leave (with pay plus US$600 per month) to study abroad. Some senior professors were given a one-year leave for postdoctoral study. Under this program every year since 1967 a total of 150 candidates have received such grants. Every furlough beneficiary has been required to sign an agreement to refund all grant money if he did not return, and to have a local guarantor to the contract. Nearly 99 percent of the grantees have returned. The some 2,300 people who have benefited from this program today form the backbone of the science community on Taiwan.

A companion program was designed to bring back scholars resident abroad as visiting professors. Those who returned for two years were given round trip fares for themselves and their families; those staying one year received round trip fares for themselves, but only half fares for their families. Each returnee, in the early 1970s, was given the salary of a univeristy professor (NT$5,000 per month), plus a stipend roughly equivalent to this salary. Thus he received twice the pay of a regular professor of the same rank. There was some criticism among the local faculty of inviting scholars who had stayed abroad to come back at higher pay, but the pay differential was required, WU feels, to induce the needed several thousand to return—and some to remain. Since 1968, due to inflation and affluence, salaries for full professors have risen to around NT$30,000 per month, while the returnee's extra stipend has only increased to NT$6,000. The stipend therefore is less of an inducement than previously, but some scholars are still coming back. WU notes with justifiable satisfaction that with these two programs "we have built up our university departments and institutes of science, and in the humanities and social sciences as well."

To upgrade the training of scientists at home, the NSC encourages professors and members of government institutes to do research as well as teach. Approved projects receive grants which can be used for purchase of equipment, books and periodicals, and for hiring assistants. NSC research grants are not comparable in money terms to those given by the U.S. National Science Foundation but, WU points out, the chances of getting the grants are much better because the competition is less.

Another of the NSC's first moves was to give annual grants to establish five basic science centers in order to coordinate work, avoid duplication of expensive journal subscriptions and insure that all practitioners in a given field would be informed of special seminars and visiting lecturers. Mathematics and chemistry centers were located at Tai Ta where those departments were stronger than in other universities; physics was centered at Ching Hua which had the largest group of physicists; biology at the Academia Sinica because of its strong zoology and botany institutes; and to draw in the more isolated south, Chengkung in Tainan was chosen for the engineering center.

The NSC also financed the formation of new university departments and research facilities for which the Ministry of Education, whose function this normally is, had no budget. For example, the Institute of Shipbuilding Engineering was started at Tai Ta in 1968 and has played an important role in ship design and model testing for the large shipbuilding facility later developed in the southern port of Kaohsiung. Since there was no study of oceanography on the island, the NSC supported the establishment of such a department at Tai Ta by acquiring a research ship from the U.S. government—one of the vessels which had been "mothballed" after World War II. It has now been retired and a new vessel has been purchased from Norway which is fully equipped to carry out physical and biological studies of the sea.

The NSC also supported an isolated group studying earthquakes which has become the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Academia Sinica. And three universities—Tai Ta, Chiaotung which specializes in communications and engineering, and Chengkung—were given support for the development of electronics research. Each of the three has developed its own computer with different approaches to Chinese character input, one of which will undoubtedly achieve national acceptance.

The NSC was also able to support various institutes of the Academia, namely, an information science institute specializing in the study of computers, an institute of biomedical research, an institute of statistics and a molecular biology laboratory. The synchrotron radiation facility, recommended by some academicians and a study group of NSC, has been established by a special fund set aside by the Executive Yuan. An institute of atomic and molecular sciences of the Academia Sinica has been located at Tai Ta.

With academic work in the basic sciences now strengthened and well organized, the NSC is branching out into other fields. It has joined with the public health administration and the medical college of Tai Ta to contract with the Pasteur Institute of France to manufacture a vaccine for newborn babies against Hepatitis B, a disease which is carried by 70 to 80 percent of the people of Taiwan. In combination with public and private donors the NSC is also helping with research in biotechnical or genetic engineering.

In the beginning the NSC submitted, through the Advisory Committee on Scientific Development, to the National Security Council and the president, a combined report of all science activities, including those conducted by the ministries of economic affairs and defense. After the death of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975 President Chiang Ching-kuo minimized the use of the agencies created by his father's exercise of the emergency powers in 1966. The National Security Council now meets only once a year to "rubber stamp" the annual budget before it is presented to the Legislative Yuan. Therefore the Advisory Committee on Scientific Development has no real function, but WU and his deputy chairmen, Tsiang Yien-si, Secretary-General of the Kuomintang, and Yen Cheng-hsing, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and others whom they may invite, continue to meet at breakfast every Monday morning at 7:30—a custom his deputies have followed for the past 17 years whether WU was in the country or not—to discuss science matters and general affairs.

WU retired from the NSC in 1973 at the age of 66 and from SUNY in 1978, returning to Taipei where he expected a more leisurely pace. Instead he found new challenges. In his earlier intermittent visits to Taiwan he had not had time to look at high school science textbooks, but now glancing at several on physics and chemistry that were being translated from an American set, he was alarmed to find "something outright wrong" in the way certain concepts were introduced and explained. He read carefully the four volumes which had already been translated for junior high school, and wrote very explicit comments and criticisms on their shortcomings to the Minister of Education and to the Science Education Center of Taiwan Normal University where the translating, editing and rewriting of the textbooks was being done.

WU believes that the Americans, recognizing that they were weak in high school and lower division collegiate level science after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, hastily abandoned some textbooks and rewrote others, and that some new versions were later found to be ill-conceived and poorly written. Not only had the translations of such poorly conceived books been used in Taiwan for some 17 years, but there was no coordination among the textbooks on the various subjects of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences.

The education minister accepted WU's criticisms, stopped the work underway and called for reevaluation of the program. Looking into the situation more deeply WU found the problem was greater than he had thought: the order of introducing the subjects into the six-year high school curriculum was itself unreasonable. He proposed reorganizing the curriculum and writing new textbooks, abandoning entirely the translation program. The ministry organized a science education advisory committee which WU was asked to chair. The other committee members were chosen "for their prestige value" (all had been either high government education officials or university presidents) and their only responsibility was to meet once a year to listen to progress reports. WU, on the other hand, was made "commander-in-chief" of the over 100 people at the Science Education Center who were actually engaged in restructuring the curriculum and rewriting the textbooks.

WU began by forming six working groups devoted to the investigation of physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, earth sciences and engineering. Each group was headed by a committee of a dozen or so persons, usually university science professors. The restructured curricula and syllabi recommended by these groups were adopted by the ministry. In consequence all senior high schools now require first year courses in basic mathematics and basic science (chemistry and physics) and one semester each of basic biology and earth sciences. These are required of all students—whatever their majors. "Everyone should have an understanding of science," WU explains.

WU reviews all the textbooks himself and wrote one for high school physics. To admirers who say, "no man of achievement and position normally does this," WU replies that writing a textbook is a question of whether the writer "has the time and the competence to come to the real fundamentals." As to his ability to spot errors he says, "I have spent all of my adult life in physics and it has soaked into my bones. "

On the basis of teacher and student reactions to trial use in a number of schools, each book was revised three times. The textbooks are now ready (fall 1984) for the first years of junior and senior high, and are scheduled to be ready for the second years in 1985 and the third in 1986.

WU is now proposing to the Ministry of Education that someone be found to do the same thing for the humanities and social sciences, where the chief problem is repetition of material in various grades and resultant student boredom. He appreciates the ministry's concern that in the "soft sciences" ambiguities may cause arguments over interpretation which did not arise in the "hard sciences."

Yet another challenge came to WU in November 1983 when he became president of the Academia Sinica. The head of the Academia is appointed by the president of the republic from among three candidates nominated by the members of the council, which is itself elected by fellows of the academy. The fellows are chosen for their contributions to science. WU had once been offered the presidency in 1962 when Hu Shih died, but he was in Canada and declined. The death in 1983 of Chien Shih-liang again threw the presidency open, and WU received the largest number of votes (90 percent) ever given a candidate. This time WU, now living in Taiwan, could not gracefully refuse, although he was 76 and would have preferred not to take on the complicated responsibility.

The academy has two basic missions: conducting scientific research in its own institutes and aiding and coordinating the scientific pursuits of other government research institutes and universities. The 18 institutes of the Academia cover the general areas of mathematics, physical sciences, life sciences, humanities and the social sciences, and were staffed when WU assumed the presidency by some 600 permanent academic personnel and 250-300 researchers, but there were fewer than 50 support positions, i.e., secretarial and managerial personnel. WU undertook to change the situation.

He began by writing an article for the government-supported newspaper which spotlighted the government's neglect. Enumerating the number of positions, the number of institutes and the paltry annual funding, he said in effect: "look at the statistical data and see whether the budgets have been reasonable." As a result of this article and other efforts, the 1984 budget rose to NT$1.1 billion (roughly US$27 million), of which 50 percent is being used for long overdue construction. He also showed the personnel director of the Executive Yuan a little book in which he had written the duties of the staff. He pointed out, for example, that there were only two guards—who could not even make the rounds of the large campus in a day; and only one switchboard operator—with the result that there was no telephone service after 5 p.m. and on weekends. His approach resulted in a gain of 20 support positions.

WU is gradually reorganizing the administration as well. He has told the heads of the institutes that before asking for larger budgets and more personnel, they must show excellence in significant directions and has said flatly that he will argue with the president's office (which has direct jurisdiction over the academy) and with the executive and legislative yuans for a budget increase of no more than 30 percent.

Academy procedures have also been streamlined. "Usually the Chinese way of doing things was to go through every stratum of the academy and sometimes it took 10 or more signatures to get a simple thing done," WU explains. Now he tells the administrators at all levels: "Do not pass the buck along. Everything that can be dealt with according to definite regulations, you will deal with." Following his precept he gave the secretary-general and the institute heads greater responsibility, at the same time assuring them that they could see him at anytime without appointment. Colleagues note that their unassuming president has delegated work to the point that he is now able to devote his time and energy to restructuring the general direction and policies of the academy, and to his own writing.

WU has published extensively throughout his professional life. His third, fourth and fifth books—Kinetic Equations of Gases and Plasmas (1966), Introduction to the Special and the General Theory of Relativity (1968 in Chinese) and Physical and Philosophical Nature of the Foundation of Modern Physics (1974)—were followed by a seven volume series on theoretical physics based on his lecture notes. He has also published 116 original research papers in such varied fields as atomic, molecular, statistical, astro and atmospheric physics; nuclear structure; scattering theory; plasmas and gases, and relativity. These papers, and 10 others done under his direction, have been published in respected professional journals in the U.S., mainland China (before 1949), Japan, India, Canada, England, Italy and Switzerland. He writes in both English and Chinese.

Colleagues have marveled at his ability to write on varied highly technical subjects while engaged in his other professional activities of professor, researcher, government official and administrator. His answer is that he writes very fast: "Some people linger for hours over a few sentences, but I don't, I am supposed to know what I am writing about; it is not like creating or doing research."

To honor him on his 70th birthday, which coincided with his retirement from SUNY, his colleague Shigeji Fujita edited The Ta-You Wu Festshrift: Science of Matter, a 334-page collection of learned articles by his former students, teachers, colleagues and friends. Another compendium, mostly of his expositions and reports on the science program, and written in Chinese, was published by the Academia Sinica of whose Institute of Physics he was then acting director. Two other volumes of his short articles on a variety of subjects, chiefly from the Chung Yang Jih Pao (Central Daily), were issued by a commercial publisher.

His articles for newspapers and periodicals are distinctive for their blunt forthrightness and independence. Readers, including government leaders, who may not like his critical views, nevertheless respect his honesty and integrity and agree that he has established a position of moral courage. In recent years he has become more, rather than less, outspoken. Between May and September 1984 he wrote almost 20 short pieces criticizing various government policies. One, for example, dealt with the Taipei garbage dump which, like dumps in other large urban centers, is too difficult for the city administration to handle. The only answer, he made clear, is for the central government to step in with the authority, technology and funding required. He believes that people read him because he is not trying to build up a readership for himself, but "hoping to needle government officials into thinking a little bit more." He doubts that his efforts are useful but knows that he is read by at least some of those he hopes to influence.

A selection of WU's newspaper comments appeared under the title Po Shih Fang Kuai (Writings by a Doctor's Degree Holder in Squares, because they were carried on the page in a small box). Another volume of WU's Selected Essays includes an account of efforts made by him and others to retain ROC membership in the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). WU, as a member of the Academia Sinica, was the chief delegate to the ICSU general assembly in 1974 (Istanbul), 1976 (Washington), 1978 (Athens, Greece), 1980 (Amsterdam) and 1982 (Cambridge, England). As it has done ever since it emerged from self-imposed isolation to join international bodies, the People's Republic of China (PRC) made as its condition of joining, the cancellation of the ROC membership. WU banked on the union statute stating that membership in this purely scientific, nongovernment, nonpolitical gathering signifies only scientific activities of a certain locality, but not a specific country. His approach was to maintain a low profile and keep the question from coming before the general assembly where the vote would be sure to go to the much larger nation, the PRC. He finally succeeded in persuading the PRC and governing council to accept two independent memberships and at the 1982 general assembly the PRC joined the union; in 1984 no further questions were raised. Scientists around the world have welcomed this affirmation of science as above politics. WU feels he has thus quietly contributed to bettering international relationships by setting a pattern of tolerance.

In his personal life WU's feelings are also non-nationalistic. When he joined the Canadian National Research Center he felt that since he held a high official position he should become a Canadian citizen, and he kept his Canadian citizenship when he took a job teaching in the United States as he thought it "silly" to keep changing nationality. His Canadian citizenship and his foreign retirement pensions have been useful because they have given him political and economic independence that he might not have had as a citizen of the ROC. "At any time I can say, 'if you don't like me I can pack up and leave right away.' " The ROC, however, recognizes dual citizenship and WU appropriately uses a ROC passport when representing that government at international conferences.

WU's economic needs are few in any case. His wife died in 1980 and his son, a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Princeton University, has a bioengineering firm in southern California where mother and son had been living since Mrs. WU found the winters in Buffalo too strenuous. WU had visited them regularly on his twice yearly commutes to and from Taiwan, and thereafter whenever meetings took him to the U.S. Father and son are close in spite of WU's lack of interest in business.

WU has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture in New York since 1962. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Canada in 1957 and of the American Physical Society in 1963. In 1967 he was awarded the Medal and Prize of the Chai-Hsing Foundation, Taipei, for his contribution to research.

He now lives with his library in two large rooms in an office building in downtown Taipei. A cook-housekeeper comes in daily from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. His breakfast is invariably oatmeal, his lunch light, and the cook leaves him a supper of soup, meat or fish dumplings and a green vegetable. On this abstemious diet he nevertheless maintains a comfortable rotundity. Since an injury in Kunming to his inner ear he has suffered periodically from disturbed equilibrium and now occasionally carries a small cane to steady his step, but he is still spritely and walks with a youthful bounce. His normally thoughtful expression is lighted by his quick wit and flashing smile.

In keeping with the mores of his scholar-official background, he has never sought material wealth, but only the satisfaction of scholarship, societal respect and, since his involvement in government, for his strongly held ideas on the modernization of education to prevail. But science has not taken root as well as he had hoped. "I am realistic but I feel disappointed at the rate things are moving," he admits. Others who share his high standards agree that much remains to be done but say without qualification that under WU's leadership the policies laid down by the National Science Council in 1967, the rewriting of science high school textbooks, and the revitalizing of the Academia Sinica have dramatically upgraded training, teaching and research in science and engineering in Taiwan. And TA-YOU WU, as they point out, is still losing no opportunity to further this progress.

November 1984
Manila

REFERENCES:

Academia Sinica, A Brief Sketch 1980-1981. Taipei: Academia Sinica 1981.

Free China Journal. Taipei. August 26,1984.

Fujita, Shigejo, ed. The Ta-you Wu Festschrift: Science of Matter. New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. 1978.

Wu, Ta-you. Hui Yi (Recollections). Taipei: Lin King Publishing Co. 1977. (Excerpts from Chinese text translated by Isabella Yen.)

______. Po Shih Fang Kuai (Writings by a Doctor's Degree Holder in Squares). In Chinese. Taipei: Yao Shun Publishing Co. 1982.

______. The Physical and Philosophical Nature of the Foundation of Modern Physics. Taipei: Lin King Publishing Co. 2nd ed. 1981.

______. Science Education Program in the Republic of China. Taipei: Advisory Committee on Science Development, National Security Council. 1984.

______. Wu Ta-you's Wen Hsuen (Selected Essays). In Chinese. Taipei: Chu-Jun Publishing Co. 1984.

Interviews with Ta-you Wu and persons acquainted with him and his work.