Prof. Siegel in the lab[Photo/JIN Magazine]

It has been four years now since Siegel started his project to create a world-class pharmaceutical program at Tianjin University, and by all accounts everything has been coming together in the same way many had envisioned. There is now a staff of over 25 international experts in various related fields, all coming from different countries around the globe. Siegel was also appointed Dean of the Life Sciences department and combined the related disciplines so students could cooperate and work together. A super computer was designed from scratch by a foreign expert and has been put into use exclusively for his departments. All labs and equipment were also set-up by experts from the respective fields, and Siegel said it best "Everything here was made by scientists for scientists."

What exists today is a school containing various scientific fields focused on the broader vision of drug discovery and development. Labs, professors, equipment and classes have been carefully put together to create an academic environment that is the first of its kind in China. Under the direction of Siegel, Tianjin University has become a prestigious place to study Pharmaceutical Science. From day one of an undergrad all the way through doctorate, all courses are conducted in English. This also makes the program ready to attract bright English speaking students from around the world.

One of the other unique aspects about this program is the mix of Chinese and Western philosophy for doing such research. Siegel pointed out some of the differences he has noticed:

"What we're learning here in China which is very cool, is that Eastern culture is much more of a systems analysis. They see something as holistic, and the removal of a piece makes it no longer what it used to be, but instead two pieces that may be nothing and have lost something. In Western culture we assume that if we have an inventory of all the pieces that we will know what things are and their functionality, everything is very reductionist. Now with the advent of fast super computers, information theories, and AI, we can tackle problems that are much more complex, interdependent, and interactive in the way they evolve that we couldn't do before. Western models had to break everything down into little pieces because the models could only handle little pieces. In the East they inherently couldn't break things down because the philosophy was based on something that was far too interdependent and complex. Now with the new information age of big data and AI, we can bring those (philosophies) together and can have the best reductionist aspects of the West and the best holistic aspects of the East.

On an application level, Siegel also hopes to take traditional Chinese medicine that has been used for thousands of years without understanding and bring it to a level of understanding where the knowledge can be used for the development of drugs based on traditional medicine.

Siegel's passion for his job goes beyond his interest in the East West dynamic of research, and many have questioned his inspiration and motivation to leave such lovely places as San Diego or Zurich and come to Tianjin. Siegel's candid explanation is that his work plateaus and he needs new challenges. For him, China is the future for many things and he wanted to be a part of it. "It's a new lifestyle, new language, new culture, and it's a new government. To negotiate all of those things in order to bring to fruition your dream of how an educational institution should look is a great opportunity. On the earth this is only going to happen in the history of human kind a limited number of times, so how many people in the history of humanity are going to get the opportunity to take a shot at something like this."

Siegel's work and contributions to the world of academia and medicine are now pushing China and Tianjin University to the forefront. Just as he is excited about being in China, we can all be excited about what the future will bring from his Chinese project. Perhaps these are the seeds being sewn that will create new breakthroughs in the Pharmaceutical world, all having started with big ideas in Tianjin.