Amsterdam to study the reversal of male-female characteristics in the brain of transsexuals. Professor Swaab explains that “how they felt turned out to be in line with the structures within their brain and not with their birth certificate.” The research resulted in an article in Nature. “That was marvellous,” says Professor Swaab. Zhou was able to stay on as a postdoctoral researcher, partly thanks to funding from the China Exchange Programme (CEP), after which he started his own research group at the University of Hefei. His wife Liu Rongyu also did her PhD with Professor Swaab and is now a professor in Hefei. Brain diseases Professor Swaab has now supervised a total of thirty-six Chinese PhDs and has held four guest professorships in Beijing, Hangzhou, and Hefei. The collaboration with China has resulted in publications in journals including Brain, Molecular Psychiatry, Archives of General Psychiatry, and Nature. When he dissects a brain in the lecture theatre, students press forward to follow from close up. “In China, they do a lot of fundamental research at cell level, for example on the synapses, the points of contact between brain cells. The work is exclusively cellular and conducted on laboratory animals because no human brain material is available. In the Netherlands, we do have that material and we can investigate the molecular causes of diseases in the brain of deceased people. We pool our findings, meaning that we complement one another very effectively.” For the next three years, Professor Swaab will be holding the Chao Kuang Piu Chair, a special professorship at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. He will be working there with the research group directed by Professor Bao Aimin and will also be involved in setting up the first Chinese brain bank. Great-grandchildren On Professor Swaab’s desk is the Chinese translation of his bestselling book Wij zijn ons brein [We are our brain]. “It’s very satisfying that the book has also been published in China,” he says, “because there is growing public interest there in how the brain works and this was the first book on that topic suitable for the general public. It has already led to interesting discussions
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