From schoolteacher to heart-starter, it took a lot of ticker to get to the top

The eldest son of a big rural family, Dr Wu Qingyu, 55, could still hear his mother coughing as she cooked for the whole family - his father and eight siblings in a village in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.

He witnessed how illnesses turned the life of a happy family upside down and even destroyed lives. "I thought of helping rid my mother and my neighbors of their illnesses when I grew up," he says.

He says as a teenager, he thought about becoming a writer, but became determined to learn something practical, such as medicine, when the "cultural revolution" broke out in 1966.

He started to read traditional Chinese medicine books. He also tried acupuncture when he returned to his hometown and was made a schoolteacher, after graduating from the middle school.

In 1973, he entered the Dr Sun Yat-sen Medical University in Guangzhou, South China's Guangdong Province, after taking preliminary enrolment examinations. The then Ministry of Education, under the guidance of late Premier Zhou Enlai, was in search of the best talents for the then worker-peasant-soldier students.

He graduated three years later and was assigned a position with the Beijing Fuwai Heart Hospital, which is also the top cardiovascular institute of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in China. At first, he was not prepared to become a heart surgeon, a thankless job as the death rate was high then.

But his attitude changed after he was enrolled in the medical academy's graduate program and then furthered his studies in Australia.

(China Daily 07/25/2007 page19)