Taiwan

Dr. Tsungming Tu, the first medical doctor and pharmacologist in Taiwan, began his studies on opiates, morphine, Chinese herbs, and snake venoms after he graduated from Kyoto Imperial University in 1922. His team has cultivated a lot of outstanding pharmacologists and toxicologists in the Graduate Institute of Pharmacology at the National Taiwan University College of Medicine (NTUCM). Among them, Drs. Chen-Yuan Lee, Chuan-Chiung Chang, Che-Ming Teng and his colleagues have conducted series of studies on snake venoms and natural products, including the discovery of bungarotoxins, which won Dr. Lee the Redi Award in 1976. There was another team of researchers who conducted studies on toxicology at the Graduate Institute of Biochemistry of the NTUCM after World War II. Among them, Drs. Ta-Cheng Tung and Jung-Yaw Lin, Guo-Huang Lin and Jen-Kun Lin were famous for studies of various phytotoxins and fungotoxins, including mimosine, abrin and ricin, territrem and azo dyes. Most of these early studies focused more on laboratory works and help the establishment of two graduate institutes of toxicology in Taiwan: one in the National Taiwan University College of Medicine (1990), with another in Chung-Shan Medical University (1996).