Qinyan Wu

Qinyan came to the Institute as a PhD student in the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where her research explored the use of an ouroboros diagram in the manuscripts and printed versions of Sacrobosco’s De anni ratione.

As a Presidential Junior Fellow at the Science History Institute, she worked on a paper project, “Controlling Systems and Controlling Legacies: Barbara McClintock’s 1961 Conversation with Two Bacterial Geneticists,” which examines how the misunderstanding about Barbara McClintock’s contribution to genetics was reinforced by François Jacob and Jacques Monod, and ironically, by the Nobel Prize that was awarded to McClintock in 1983.

Qinyan is also interested in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), the standardized and institutionalized—thus modernized—form of Chinese medicine in the People’s Republic of China. She will also conduct an oral history of Professor Yung-Chi Cheng, a professor of pharmacology at Yale University, about his research on the integration of Chinese medicine with cancer and viral chemotherapy.