Many ask the same question, and the answer was what Charles C. Mann and I set out to explore in August of 2002. China is doing major research on the cloning front, much of it government funded; for the details you can read Mann's article which appeared in Wired Magazine's January 2003 issue here.
My job was fixer, translator, and interpreter.
Although it was my first experience with a job like this, things went quite smoothly. I must admit, we did run through airports only to barely catch planes just about every time, but I kept us to a tight schedule and packed a lot of interviews and lab tours into a short two weeks because of it (usually two per day, sometimes three).
I first went to Nanning by myself and spent some time living with my firend Zhao Youjun, while doing research on the internet and calling scientists and labs to make arrangements. Then I headed for Beijing and met up with Charles Mann, family friend and writer for the Atlantic Monthly and other publications. (You can see his website here; he has a new book out now, called 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.) He was going to write the article based on what we learned through meetings with the top people in cloning research.
So we traveled around Beijing, as well as to Tianjin, Shanghai, Changsha, and Guangzhou, meeting mostly with scientists working in various fields of cloning research. As most everything we saw was classified, obviously I didn't take any pictures.
But, I did take some random pictures on the two days or so that we slowed down from our hectic pace:
Most of 2002 before this was spent at Berkeley moving towards actually getting a degree, and after we finished in China, I headed over to Taiwan to study, but I've pushed all the Taiwan stuff into the 2003 page.
Two months later I returned to China and spent a few days revisiting some of the scientists with a photographer to take some pictures for the magazine.
[15 jun 05]