University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: May 17, 2007

By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer

Sent from school to labor as a peasant farmer in Southeast China, Dalian Ding has overcome tremendous obstacles to earn a reputation as one the most prolific research scholars at UB—not to mention one of the greatest inner-ear anatomists in the country.

Dalian Ding, who started out with nothing as a peasant farmer during China’s Cultural Revolution, has become a noted inner-ear anatomist and prolific scholar.
PHOTO: NANCY J. PARISI

The son of a military official who at age 16 fell victim to the unrest and anti-capitalist sentiment that ran rampant during China's Cultural Revolution, Ding was one of millions of college-bound men and women exiled to rural farms in China in 1968.

"Everyday I worked over 12 hours," recalls Ding, associate research professor in the Center for Hearing and Deafness, Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, during a recent interview with the Reporter. "You had to get to work very early and work until very late at night. For a whole year I didn't wear shoes; even in the wintertime I had to work in the swampland or the field."

The payment for such labor? Less than 23 Chinese coins daily, which is roughly equivalent to three U.S. cents or less. Worse yet, he says the farmers soon started to claim "you ate more than you earned" and demanded he return what scant cash he had received. Ding, still only a young boy, was forced to pay the farmers for food he ate, despite his diligent work.

The chance to escape these conditions took about two years, says Ding, explaining that he was hired for a job in Union Hospital, affiliated with Wuhan Medical University, which was searching the countryside for "fresh blood."

"I went to the hospital to clean and mop floors, to wash spittoons, to take care of patients, to distribute lunch and dinner," says Ding. "I knew nothing about medicine, but I worked at a hospital. In the evening, I went to night school because the hospital didn't really need workers; they wanted medical assistants and nurses." The shortage of professionals was a great concern at the time because all the universities had closed during the Cultural Revolution, he says.

"I think we got some very good training in that very difficult period of time," says Ding, who trained as a nurse and then was chosen to serve as a technician in the otolaryngology department and the otology laboratory.

In 1978, Ding moved to Shanghai and sought to reclaim his education. He worked full-time as a technician in the otology laboratory in the otolaryngology department in Renji Hospital, which was affiliated with Shanghai Second Medical University, and spent nights and weekends going to school. "I had to restart middle school," he says, "then go to high school in the evening, then college." He published his first research paper in 1981, graduated from the Bioengineering Department of Fudan University in 1989, and in 1998 earned the equivalent of a master's degree in neuroscience from the J. R. Ringer Credential Evaluation Inc. "That was really difficult, but I didn't give up," he says. "I wanted to learn to make up for missed lessons." The hardest part was not the study or work, he says, but the time not spent with his young son, Feng.

Over the next 15 years, Ding worked his way up from technician to assistant research fellow to associate research professor—a rare promotion—at Shanghai Second Medical University, and played an important role in the development of the otology laboratory at Renji Hospital. Ding also established a well-known series of national education and training courses on inner-ear physiology and pathology. So far, he says, he has held 15 workshops from 1985 to 2006, training nearly all of the researchers and technicians working in the fields of otology and otolaryngology in China.

In 1995, Ding joined the research faculty at UB after being offered a position based on reputation alone. A Chinese graduate student at the university brought him to the attention of Richard Salvi, professor of communicative disorders and sciences and director of the Center for Hearing and Deafness.

"I feel like he's one of our secret weapons," Salvi says. "Ding has an outstanding research record and is probably one of the best inner-ear anatomists in the country—maybe the world."

Salvi and Ding are co-investigators on a $227,000 grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to investigate the protective effect of chemical compounds, such as the calpain inhibitor leupeptin and the P53 inhibitor pifithrin, on microscopic "hair cells"�the auditory sensory cells that transduce mechanical sound waves into neural activity in the brain. The subject has become a "hot topic" in hearing research, explains Salvi, noting that concerns about drug-induced hearing loss are on the rise in developing nations due to the use of cheap antibiotics and anticancer drugs that damage the inner ear.

Research on the project is carried out on cells culled from test subjects and cultivated under artificial conditions in the lab—a practice that enables more precise experimentation, plus reduces the need for animal testing. But because microscopic inner-ear cells from small animal models require a gifted anatomist to dissect, laboratories from Boston to South Florida have started to contract out the process to UB.

"You have to have really good hands," says Salvi, estimating that less than 5 percent of anatomists master the procedure routinely performed by Ding.

In addition to his anatomical skills, Ding has authored more than 200 papers and close to 20 book chapters. Twenty years ago, he never imagined that such a prolific career lay ahead of him.

"I dreamed that in my life I could maybe publish 10 papers," says Ding, "but now, in fact, I've written about 220. I can't stop myself," he laughs.

Ding resides in Amherst with his wife, Haiyan Jiang, a research technician in the Center for Hearing and Deafness. A former technician at the Shanghai Physiology Institute, Haiyan helped Ding so much with his work when he first came to UB that she, too, was hired by the university, Ding says. Their son, Feng, 26, who received a master's degree in computer engineering from UB, was hired recently by IBM.

"The people from [Ding's] generation [in China] that have survived and done well are some remarkable people," Salvi adds, noting that Ding "started out with nothing and through sheer willpower made things happen."