Health condition of the CAE Members has been given more and more attention to by the leaders of CAE as the Members are getting in-creasingly aged. Their health care has been en-listed in “Work Program in 2010-2014 of CAE” as one of the most important work in the construction of Member’s Home. CAE decided to hold, from time to time, "the Academic Re-port Series on Health Care", in order to improve the health awareness among the Members, making them and their families enhance the knowledge of health care.

    The first lecture was given in the lecture hall of CAE on September 28, 2010. Mr. Fan Daiming, Vice President of CAE, gave the very first lecture of the report series entitled “The Advances and Retreats of Three Thousand Years of Life Sciences”. President Zhou Ji attended the lecture. Mr. Pan Yunhe, Executive Vice President, presided over the report meeting. Some 100 CAE Members in Beijing and their families listened to the lecture.

    Fan’s speech extended from the origin of life to the development of life sciences, citing the significant characters and works in the fields of life sciences at all times in China and foreign countries. He divided the development of life sciences of the three thousand years into four stages, and a detailed comparison was made between the advances and retreats of life science development in China and the West in each of the periods.

    Fan talked about the three most important ancient Chinese medical books (“Inner Canon of Yellow Emperor”, that is “Huang Di Nei Jing” for example) and three most important ancient Chinese medical sages (Zhang Zhongjing, taken as an example), from the sage of traditional Chinese medicine, to the structure of Chinese characters and then to all kinds of natural phenomena which led him right to his topic and illustration. Fan summarized the essence of the basic medicine, clinical medicine and pharmacy in plain language with rich historical materials, who actually fully displayed the life science development profile in the past three thousand years of human history. Fan’s report was full of humor, fairly entertaining, and thought-provoking as well, who presented a very vivid life science course and made a wonderful opening for "the Aca-demic Report Series on Health Care"

    (By Tang Haiying, October 2010; translated by Liu Chang)