Wu Chien-hsiung: Overturning Sexual Barriers --And the Laws of Physics

On an afternoon not long before Christmas in 1993, the streets of New York were jammed with holiday shoppers, and a festive spirit pervaded the city. Yet in a peaceful apartment building next to the campus of Columbia University, the phone wouldn't stop ringing. A retired Chinese couple in their eighties were continually holding discussions with European and American physicists, and they simply didn't have time to buy Christmas presents for their family.

Wu Chien-hsiung and her husband Yuan Chia-lin, both fellows of Academia Sinica, came to Taipei just last October to participate in the opening ceremonies of the first synchrotron radiation center to be established in China on either side of the strait. They began acting as consultants and promoters of the center more than ten years ago, and since returning to America, they have continued recruiting for it. The center will not only quicken the fostering of high caliber researchers but also help to lay the groundwork for Taiwan to become a future center of high energy physics research and experimentation.

Wu Chien-hsiung, who has an refined aura about her, and her amiable husband Yuan Chia-liu, are major figures in different fields within the US physics community, In the male-dominated world of science, Wu's achievements have particularly attracted people's curiosity and attention. How did she make such a success of herself?

In 1912 Wu Chien-hsiung was born in Liuhe Township of Taicang County near Shanghai and excelled in school from an early age. Whether in elementary school, junior high school and high school or the summer session of a private prep school, she often received perfect marks for Chinese and English and she was a good writer. The famous writer Dr. Hu Shih, who once taught her, says that if she had polished her skills she would have become a star in China's literary world.

And among all the different disciplines, she especially liked physics, because "numerous aspects of the physical world, which on the surface appear strange and fantastic, seem to have a marvelous and mysterious order to them under the surface," she says now, many years later. "It deeply attracted me."

In 1930 Wu Chien-hsiung passed the entrance exam for National Central University in Naning, her first choice and the most prestigious university in China south of the Yangtze. There she got a good grounding in physics and math. Upon graduation, she worked at Academia Sinica for two years before deciding to go abroad for further study.

At the time very few women were enrolling in universities abroad. How did she become one of the pioneers?

"It was all because of my father," Wu says, with a face that reveals her gratitude. From her very masculine name of "Chien-hsiung"--which translates as "robust hero"--you can see the expectations her father had for her.

An anti-Ching revolutionary who later returned to his hometown to establish an elementary school and serve as its principal, her father held very liberal beliefs. He advocated the equality of the sexes and provided his own daughter and other girls with the best possible of educations. And though Wu Chien-hsiung's mother had received no education, she went along with her husband's preachings. From time to time she would visit homes in their village to urge the parents to send their daughters to school and by all means not bind their feet.

"Father was busy all day," Wu Chien-hsiung recalls," and when people asked him what he was so busy with, he would say, 'I am striving so that girls will all have a place to go to study and the old a place to go to speak of their troubles and so that fears will keep no one awake at night." And she admits that her father's open heart, his insistence on doing the right thing, his fearlessness in the face of obstacles and his persistence deeply influenced her own character.

With great help from friends and relatives, in 1936 Wu Chien-hsiung went to the United States. Originally intending to study at the University of Michigan, she finally decided upon the University of California at Berkeley with its assemblage of great physicists. It's there that she met the scholarly and gentle Yuan Chia-liu, a graduate of Yan-jing University who had arrived at Berkeley a little before her.

Yuan came from an illustrious family. His paternal grandfather was Yuan Shih-kai, a war lord who died 83 days after proclaiming himself emperor during the early republican era. His father Yuan Kewen was a prominent man of letters who was deeply respected in academic circles in Shanghai.

Unlike Wu, who was studying nuclear physics, Yuan was studying high-energy physics. When Wu had just arrived and all was unfamiliar, Yuan served as her volunteer guide, and he introduced her to Ernest O. Lawrence, who would win a Nobel Prize for researching the structure of the atomic nucleus and the process of its decay.

A year later Yuan transferred to Cal Tech for financial reasons, and Wu remained in Berkeley. The two kept in close contact. Wu's intelligence and refinement and Yuan's gentleness and sincerity attracted them to each other. Yuan, who had a host of suitors in college, never expected that she would find a companion for a lifetime and a future husband in America.

And she never had expected that a woman wanting to make a name for herself would encounter so many obstacles.

In those days, women in the West--whether in Europe or the United States--faced discrimination. Maria Mayer, who won a Nobel prize for researching the structure of the nucleus, once served as an instructor at Columbia University, where her husband also taught. Because of university regulations about a husband and wife working together, she received no salary at all. Although Marie Curie won the Nobel prize twice, she was never made a member of the French Academy of Sciences, the highest honor that nation grants a scientist.

And Wu had her race as well as sex working against her. In 1940, after she had obtained a doctorate, she stayed on at Berkeley as a research assistant for two years. Her outstanding talents in nuclear physics had won her renown both at Berkeley and elsewhere, but the university was unwilling to make her an instructor. At the time, America's 20 leading universities had not a single woman physics professor among them. And as an ethnic Chinese and foreign national, she was discriminated against even more. Wu's advisor Emilio Segre’ was exasperated over the situation.

In 1942 Wu married Yuan Chia-liu and they both found work on the East Coast--albeit in different states: Yuan in Princeton, New Jersey and Wu at Smith College in Massachusetts. On the weekends they would get together in New York City.

Wu Chien-Hsiung's true interests lay in research, and Smith didn't have physics research facilities. A year later, on her former teacher Lawrence's recommendation, she got offers from eight different schools, among these the famous universities of Princeton, MIT, and Columbia. At the time, these schools were completely male worlds.

In order to be closer to her husband, she decided upon Princeton. Then 1944, she finally put down the heavy burden of teaching and went back to research. At Columbia she conducted research and then began teaching as well, and she became a full professor there in 1957.

During World WarII, because she and Yuan helped to conduct experiments for and manufacture the atom bomb, the US government restricted their contacts. After the war, with well-known achievements in physics, Wu Chien-hsiung continued researching peaceful applications for atomic power at Columbia, while Yuan Chia-liu began researching energetic particles at the Brookhaven National Laboratory two hours away.

Yuan would return home to spend his weekends with Wu. Because Yuan was excellent in the lab, at dusk on Friday you could often find him in Wu's laboratory, helping the students.

Nobel Prize winner L.W. Alvarez once complimented Wu by describing her as "one of the most talented and beautiful experimental physicists I have ever known." She sees research as a kind of a mission and not merely as a job. Working late on her experiments as a student, she would often return home alone in the wee hours of the morning. The professors could not help but scold her for her own good. One graduate student volunteered to drive her home. At three and four o'clock every morning, he would cry from outside the laboratory, "Miss Wu, it's time to go home!"

Her adviser Segre’ was always urging her not to exhaust herself with her work. "You also need some time to read," he would say. "Sometimes only after going home will you be able to make sense of something!" Now years later, she pleads with her son in the same manner.

A highly determined woman, she believes that "success is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."

Wu often criticizes her own English as not being up to snuff. She will sometimes confuse "she" and "he" and sometimes her pronunciation isn't clear enough. In emotional moments her definite articles and verb conjugations will disappear. And so as not to worry she writes out any reports or speeches she is going to deliver orally.The night before she will go to bed early and then get up as early as three or four o'clock to prepare. During one presentation, swept up in the passion of the moment, she started writing equations on the blackboard like Chinese, from right to left!

Very self-disciplined, she holds high expectations of her students. She feels they should be like her, possessing a passion about their work, putting out everything they've got. Her ideal is working from morning to night, with no exception made for the weekend. She doesn't only want experiments done faster, but she wants them done correctly. She doesn't even quite really understand why some people have to take more than 15 minutes out for lunch.

Thinking that the mice could play while the cat was away, her students once gave her two tickets to a children's movie. They figured that she would take her son. Their celebration came to an short lived and abrupt close when they saw Wu return. "I let my son go with the baby sitter," she said.

For one period, Wu Chien-hsiung had the nick name "Dragon Lady." Columbia Professor Noemie Koller, who was Wu's student, protests,"We never called her that! Among all the teachers at Columbia, there were none who cared for students as much as Wu."

During student experiments she patiently gave guidance and corrections. Wu is an avid gardener, and epiphyllums fill her home with their fragrance. Inviting students home to enjoy them with her, she would give a leaf to each student, urging them to go home and "experiment on planting it."

Her students all thought of her as "trustworthy and dependable." And competing scientists who came to different conclusions or who redid her experiments would all eventually admit, "She was right!"

And she would earnestly instruct students about their mistakes. "If the results of your research differ from other people's," she would say, "besides needing to point out where you are right, you've got to point out where others are wrong."

At one time Wu Chien-hsiung's alma mater National Central University wanted her to return to the mainland to teach, but she turned down the offer after talking it over with her husband. A major reason was that they didn't want their son to grow up under communism. And in 1954 they became naturalized American citizens.

Two years later Wu had the most dramatic experience of her life.

Scientists call the physical world they can see with their eyes and microscopes the "macroscopic system." What they cannot observe, they call the"microscopic system." They think that the many basic particles in the microscopic system all move according to certain rules, one of which was "the law of parity conservation." In 1956 two young Chinese scientists, Yang Chen-ning and Li Cheng-tao, harbored doubts about the accuracy of this law, but no one was willing to attempt the difficult experiments needed to overturn the law. And so they went to Wu, well known for the accuracy of her work, and asked her to design an experiment that would prove their hypothesis. Striking down a law in science could be described as a revolutionary supposition; only an extremely precise experiment would do.

Word got around about what they were doing. Many bet Wu would fail, while others observed coolly from the sidelines, taking a wait-and-see approach.

She was just about to go with her husband to a research symposium in Geneva and she planned on returning to the mainland afterwards for a look. This was going to be the first time home in 20 years. Her passage on the boat was already booked. What was she to do? Wu Chien-hsiung thought about it long and hard before deciding she would have to manage her time well for this extremely challenging experiment. Yuan Chia-Liu returned by himself.

For the following few months, she got only three or four hours sleep a night. Because the instruments at Columbia weren't advanced enough, she carried out her experiments at the National Bureau of Standards' low temperature research labs in Washington. She would often travel between New York and Washington, without relaxing a moment all day, and her spirits were being stretched to the limit.

On the morning of January 9, 1957, the janitor discovered an empty bottle of French champagne in the lab's garbage bin; they knew that their experiment was a success! The results sent a shockwave through the world of physics. A year later, Yang Chen-ning and Li Cheng-tao shared a Nobel Prize. Wu's not being named as a co-winner surprised many.

An idea is only supported by successful experimentation, and the person responsible for this was not getting her due--how could this be so? How was it that she missed out on the Nobel Prize?

Some people hold that the Nobel Prize for physics is given for new discoveries or theories and to the people who were their originators. While Wu made major contributions to supporting their idea, she does not qualify for the Nobel under the above criteria.

Others stress that under the guidelines for the giving of the Nobel, one prize cannot go to more than three people. At the National Bureau of Standards, Wu carried out her experiments with a group of scientists headed by one from Oxford, who believed that the honors did not belong to her alone. Many believe that under pressure from the British government, the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences decided just to give it to Yang and Li, so as to prevent breaking with usual practices.

"She ought to have won a Nobel Prize," laments Li Kwoh-ting, a senior adviser to President Lee. But this omission has not diminished Wu's achievements nor her status in the world of physics.

Is Wu still bothered by the outcome? "When I was doing the experiments, I didn't think about winning the prize. . . ." While her tone is quite calm and collected now, she must have been struggling inside at the time. She says in a reserved fashion, "Anyway, my work has received many other affirmations."

Wang Wen-yi, a professor of physics at Columbia, points out that a key to the Allies' victory in World War II was the work physicists did in researching the atomic bomb and radar. As a result, physics was highly regarded after the war, and physics associations also became important academic institutions. Up to now, the American Physics Society has had only two chairwomen, one of whom was Wu, renowned for her great contributions to the field of nuclear physics.

She has also been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences and won the US National Medal of Science and the highly regarded Comstock award among many others. She has more than ten honorary degrees from world-famous universities.And today, retired but as busy as ever, she is working to raise standards of scientific and technical education in Taiwan and the mainland.

In 1992 four Chinese Nobel Prize winning scientists--Li Cheng-tao, Yang Chen-ning, Ting Tsao-chung and Lee Yuan-tseh--came to Taipei to promote the establishment of the "Wu Chien-hsiung Scholarship Foundation," and wanted to give the 80-year-old Wu a surprise party. She got wind of the affair beforehand, and refused to attend, going into hiding. "I don't like the public spotlight," she said. "I'm just a researcher who's just had good luck and respectable results, that's ail. There's no need to name a foundation after me." Only with her husband's coaxing did she finally agree to accept.

Having spent most of her life in America, Wu Chien-hsiung has clearly been imbued with Western reason and its search for objectivity, but at the same time she holds onto the Chinese personality traits of prudence, humbleness, and ability to endure great suffering. There's also her "insistence" about things Chinese: she likes to eat Chinese food, wears tailored Chinese ch'i-p'aos, and has kept a Chinese name.

When Yuan Chia-liu came to the United States, he went native and took the foreign name of Luke.Wu, on the other hand, has steadfastly refused to change her name. Because "Chien-hsiung" was just too hard to pronounce, most of her fellow graduate students just called her "Miss Wu." The US Immigration didn't know that she was a woman and mixed her up with a man who spelled his name the same way. The resulting mistakes made her file many inches thick.

And Wu's smiling face is very much in the Chinese style--with a hand demurely covering the mouth. One of her professors once even said that he had never seen her teeth!

So that her only son would study Chinese, Wu once arranged Chinese classes for him during a summer vacation, and she also taught him herself. But the surroundings weren't ideal for learning Chinese, and the anxious mother eventually gave up. As for her son's choice of a Westerner as a bride, she faced the situation straight on. "After all, children and grandchildren have their own lives to lead." Wu's son followed in his parents' footsteps, also earning a doctorate in physics. He now works in research.

A woman, Wu Chien-hsiung has endured all of the discrimination and pressure of a traditional male chauvinist society. And while not all of her recollections may be happy ones, she still believes, "God has given men and women equal intelligence, and thus women should have the same rights and duties as men. . . . They shouldn't be scared off by the difficulties of math and physics, and even more importantly they shouldn't step back from their careers for the sake of their families."

At every opportunity she gets, she encourages women to become scientists. Yet one fears that the successful balancing of career and family that she has so adeptly accomplished may require more than determination and hard work. It may also require a bit of luck!

[Picture Caption]

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Wu Chien-hsiung and Yuan Chia-liu in front of the Columbia University Library.

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Wu and Yuan make an appearance with officialdom: former president Yen Chia-kan (far left), former senior presidential adviser ChangChun (second from right), and former president of National Taiwan University Yen Chen-hsing(far right). (photo courtesy of Wang Cheng-sheng)

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In 1992 four Chinese Nobel Prize winners--Lee Yuan-tseh (far left),Li Chen-tao (second from left), Ting Chao-chung (third from right) and Yang Chen-ning (far right)-- signed a petition in Taipei to create a "Wu Chien-hsiung Foundation."(photo courtesy of Yuna Chia-liu)

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(left) In honor of Wu's outstanding achievements, the scientists at the Mt. Zijin Observatory named an asteroid they discovered(Asteroid Number 2572) after her. (photo courtesy of Wu Chien-hsiung).

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The Synchrotron Radiation Center that was formally completed in October of last year has one of the world's first three second-generation synchrotron accelerators. In order to honor Yuan Chia-liu for his work promoting the center, Premier Lien Chan made Yuan a member of the Order of the Brilliant Star on behalf of President Lee. (photo courtesy of the Central News Agency)

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About 1960, Yuan Chia-liu went to France to spend a year as a visiting professor, and he brought his only son Vincent along with him. Here they have dressed up for a friend's dinner party. (photo courtesy of Yuan Chia-liu)

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A corner in their New York City apartment.Though Wu enjoys gardening, she hasn't much time, and so many of her plants are artificial.