From the archives: changing landscapes in China

Alumnus Nelson Kardos (MSc Biochemistry 1973) shares his memories of time working in China from 1976 to 2003.

An American brought up in Philadelphia, Nelson says he chose to study at Imperial “because it had the very best programme in the world for biochemical engineering, including an industrial scale fermentation pilot plant.” He credits the College for having had a profound and continuing influence on his life. He particularly valued the merging of theoretical science with practical engineering applications and the encouragement to set himself high standards for excellence.

He describes what led him to work in China:

“I was able to first visit China in 1976 as a foreign expert for the pharmaceutical industry thanks to introduction and references from my Imperial professor – Sir Ernst Chain. Professor Chain had won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1945 for his development of penicillin as the first antibiotic. He helped a number of countries start up their own penicillin plants, including China in 1954. I was interested to do some work in China as it represented an opportunity to work with an ancient culture that was about to burst into the 20^th century. While the Cultural Revolution formally ended in China in late 1976, it remained a closed society until the early 1990s. I traveled back and forth frequently between China and the USA, making 132 trips to China over a 22 year period, with a cumulative stay there amounting to six years. This was a period of extraordinary change. I found the Chinese people stimulating to work with, and admired their energy to catch up to the outside world. I worked in China until 2003, and since then the pace of change has only increased.”

Below are some of the photographs Nelson took while working in China between 1976 and 2003.