C. C. Li was born on October 27, 1912, in
Dagukou (Taku),
Tianjin, China. He received a
Bachelor of Science in
agronomy from the
University of Nanking in 1936 and a PhD in plant breeding and genetics from
Cornell University in 1940. He worked as post-doctoral fellow at
Columbia University and
North Carolina State University from 1940 to 1941. Li returned to China at the age of 30 and became the Professor of
Genetics and
Biometry at University of Nanking, his alma mater, in 1943. After
World War II, he moved to Beijing for a Professorship and dean of Agronomy at
Peking University in 1946, where he finished
An Introduction to Population Genetics in 1948. The book was the first notable publication where a combination of the ideas of
Ronald Fisher,
Sewall Wright, and
J. B. S. Haldane about population genetics was brought to and made understandable to the academia. Li became
persona non grata for studying and teaching
genetics following the 1949 establishment of a
communist government in
mainland China. The new government took the diplomatic policy of "
Leaning to One Side" and adopted Soviet thought and action, including the genetic thought of the Soviet pseudoscientist
Trofim Lysenko, who was standing against
Mendelian inheritance. In 1949, Li was appointed as a professor at
Beijing Agricultural University (now China Agricultural University), which had been recently founded through the merger of the Colleges of Agriculture at
Peking University,
Tsinghua University, and
North China University (now the Renmin University of China). Li was persecuted by the party branch secretary of Beijing Agricultural University, Le Tianyu, because of Li's defense of genetics. Li joined the newly founded
School of Public Health (GSPH) at the
University of Pittsburgh in 1951. He became Professor of Biometry in 1960 and later chaired the School of Public Health's Department of
Biostatistics from 1969 to 1975. He also served as the president of the
American Society of Human Genetics in 1960. Despite officially retiring in 1982, he continued to publish another 25 academic papers and go to work at his office every day until a few months before his death in 2003. == Bibliography ==