Joachim Messing,

Schekman began investigating networks of intracellular membranes associated with the transport of proteins in the yeast

at Berkeley. With the aid of others in his laboratory, he screened yeast for mutations that blocked the secretion of certain enzymes from cells. The work led to the discovery of regulating proteins.

“Over the years, I have seen great change in China. There is enormous investment by the government in basic science, which is very encouraging. Everywhere I go, there is optimism about the growth and application of basic science.”

“One thing that’s very important is giving young scholars the opportunity to create independently and not be managed by government bureaucrats to the point that officials appear to control them. That’s really the most important thing about creativity, to give early-career people freedom to pursue their own curiosity.”

“It is very encouraging to hear that more Chinese parents expect their children to be scientists. … So what I would urge is that children even at a young age have opportunities to do scientific experiments themselves, and think experimentally about how they test things. As I grew up, the most important thing in the development of my interest in science was not so much the classes I took but the

After he arrived at Rutgers University in 1985, Messing initiated research on computational and structural biology and added to molecular genetics the regulation of gene expression and biomolecular interactions. He died on Sept 13.

“China has been doing well economically, and that has generated a lot of resources that are necessary to develop science bases. You have a lot of people being trained in the US, and they will come back to China. And then they have gained experience on how to produce technology and generate concepts and bring them back here. China has invested a lot of money in recent years in research.”

“I have a lot of Chinese colleagues in my lab doing research in the agriculture field, and I’m happy that I can contribute to the Chinese

Caucher Birkar is a mathematician of great originality and depth. His research area of algebraic geometry addresses fundamental questions about the nature of abstract geometric spaces. His work has produced major advances in birational geometry, particularly in a central paradigm known as the Minimal Model Program.

“I don’t know the development of basic research in other areas. But in mathematics, China has invested a lot of money in very good centers of mathematics — for example, Tsinghua University, Peking University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and also a center at Fudan University in Shanghai. It’s growing very fast I think, and it seems to have a bright future.”

“The Chinese government recently issued a regulation to strengthen mathematical science research. It is the right thing to do, because mathematics is the basis of science and technology. Without strong mathematics, it is hard to develop long-term, sustainable science and technology.”

Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler, ALGOL W, Pascal, Modula, Modular-2, Oberon, Oberon-2 and Oberon-7. He received the Association for Computing Machinery’s Turing Award for the development of these languages in 1984. In 1994, he was inducted as a Fellow of the association.

“Overall, I see that China has made tremendous progress. I have a good friend who has an electronics company, and he moved the production of products to China — first to Taiwan, until it became too expensive there, and then to Shanghai, and when that became too expensive, then to Suzhou. I have a very strong feeling that China is making a gigantic effort.”

“It is very important to have good teachers and good schools to raise them, and also to teach people to think for themselves, which is absolutely fundamental.”