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these questions of interest? What strategies would these students use to answer one or more questions? What are the limitations of these strategies? Are these alternatives? What form will the results take? (OD units, mg/g, spots or bands or elution profiles?) etc.

All of these approaches have been used. They are not substitutes for laboratory or technical skills, but exercises intended to develop the intellectual or conceptual skills that are an important component of laboratory work. Many graduate students have laboratory skills but poor intellectual skills and are thus good technicians, but poor experimenters.

Professor Mehler said that 'dry labs' are a serious enterprise, since many laboratory exercises and exper- iments lack an intellectual component and our responsi- bility is to develop the intellectual skills of biochemistry students. He stressed that in life many of us have to deal with experiments in which we make no practical manipu- lations. A question-and-answer approach that he uses often, with students in small or large groups, is to pose a problem, develop an approach and supply some results. Then students design further approaches on the basis of these results. The instructor then questions and guides.

Mongolian Allsorts m A Biochemist's Reminiscences of Mongolia

DAVID MARSH

140 Boulevard de l'H6pital 75013 Paris, France

Introduction When I first went to work at the Mongolian State University in Ulan Bator, I was flattered by being something of a novelty. Not only did I represent ten per cent of the entire British population in Mongolia, but I was also a research scientist intent on extracting myosin from yak meat. This plan prompted a diplomat at the British Embassy to remark that he always left that bit on the side of his plate.

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Final Words China has a long and respected tradition of scholarship which has served it well throughout most of its history. In the last decade the environment for science has changed significantly, major institutional and educational reforms have been announced, the status of scientists and academics is being improved, and international exchanges of scientists are proceeding at a fast pace. This was obvious during our workshop and the travel associated with it.

Recommendations The Official Report on the Work- shop contains a number of recommendations which the IUB team felt would be useful in modernising the teaching of biochemistry and the training of biochemists in Chinese Universities.

We encourage our Chinese colleagues to proceed on the road of change, of exploring different approaches in the teaching of biochemistry and in the training of biochem- ists, so as to achieve the best results for their eager and intelligent students. We assure them and the Chinese Biochemical Society of our best wishes for their efforts, and the Committee on Education of The International Union of Biochemistry welcomes other opportunities to be of service to our Chinese friends.

My first visit to the Mongolian People's Republic began quietly enough in a railway station in London one Friday morning. Two and a half days later I was at Moscow's Yaroslavskaya Station, boarding the train for Ulan Bator. I passed much of the five-day journey in the restaurant car, talking to railway employees and fellow-travellers. Felix ran the restaurant and talked of his grandfather, who was a costumier at the Odessa Theatre in Chaliapin's time. When not engineering, Vassily was busy persuading me of the merits of vodka in promoting international understanding. Igor introduced himself as a "very import- ant person", and a sports official in his home town. "So you organise sports meetings?", I enquired naively. "I'm more important than the organiser", he replied, "I just watch". Strelnikova the cook said nothing and kept turning out the meat balls.

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In Ulan Bator our bovine minced meat suffered an altogether less appetising fate in salt solutions, beakers and centrifuges. We obtained it at the city Meat Combine, a modern plant built with East German help and patrolled on high by circling buzzards. An urbane gentleman presided over the on-site laboratory, which was womanned by ten research workers and technicians who supplied us with the equipment necessary for the enzyme preparations.

Very little work had been published on protein variants from these Bovidae and we decided to carry out some comparative studies. The myosins proved very similar in terms of enzymatic turnover and spectroscopic character- istics. More detailed examination by peptide mapping on one- and two-dimensional polyacrylamide gels confirmed the close evolutionary relation o3 these members of the genus Bos, but also revealed differences in heavy chain polypeptide sequences (Comp Biochem Physiol. 76B, 185, 1983).

Nomenclature After an absence of five years, I recently returned to the University in Ulan Bator to work with my Mongol colleagues. The head of the lab is a knowledgeable and affable man who is prevented from working at the bench by the demands of paperwork, committee meetings and teaching. During our discussions in his office he was occasionally seized by endearing insecticidal tendencies, and would climb onto his desk and flail at the air with a tightly rolled copy of the Party organ Unen ("Truth").

My colleagues had wonderful names. Quite a few Mongols have Tibetan names, reminders of a shared Buddhist heritage, but these do not readily lend them- selves to translation. Traditional Mongolian names can be rendered in English though, and I counted Sunflower, Iron Hero, Peace, Golden Mail (coat), Rainbow and Lustrous Flame among my colleagues and friends.

Yak myosin When I left the University a few months later, some experiments were incomplete and it was agreed that the myosin samples should accompany me back to Europe, where the work could be finished. The journey home, via China, went smoothly, except for one moment of panic when the ice holding the samples melted during the 36- hour train ride from Ulan Bator to Beijing. Happily, a railway attendant promptly found a block of ice, which we pulverized with a Chinese Railways regulation spanner at the feet of a group of amused onlookers.

The myosins thus .saved from a proteinicidal stewing were from the yak (Bos grunniens), cattle (Bos taurus) and the first and second generation hybrids (called 'khainak' and 'ortom' respectively in Mongolian). Yaks are well adapted to high altitude and cold and have played an important economic role in the highlands of Central Asia since the Neolithic era. They are prized as strong, agile pack animals and for their meat and milk. The first filial generation of the yak-cattle cross exhibits heterosis and is superior to both parental stocks in terms of hardiness and productivity. Hybrid vigour is lost in the second filial generation, which, for this reason, is seldom bred.

Discussion Lab tea breaks provided good opportunities for scientific discussion or desultory conversation. We usually drank Russian black tea, for which I was grateful as I never managed to acquire a taste for traditional Mongolian tea, a milky concoction containing salt and optional knobs of melted butter. One recurrent conversational theme con- cerned the organization of scientific research under the capitalist and socialist systems (see our article on science at the Mongolian State University in Biochemical Edu- cation 14, 121, 1986). My position as a floating post- doctoral researcher proved particularly difficult for Mongol scientists to appreciate. They wondered at the inherent professional insecurity (and well they might!), and were struck by the curious notion of an itinerant researcher seeking fellowships and a receiving institute.

Ulan Bator is a rather large, sprawling city of 400,000 inhabitants, but its atmosphere resembles that of a village where friends and acquaintances are bumped into at almost every turning. This was how, one Saturday evening, I came to be taken rather tipsily by the arm and told of "something very important for your science". Intrigued, if a little incredulous, I listened as my bibulous companion claimed to be the owner of an unusual and valuable egg, indeed a dinosaur's egg laid 70 million years ago in the Gobi Desert. At this point the encounter seemed to be assuming an almost surrealistic character, but I felt that the conversation had potential, even if only comic. And so it did, but then that's another story.

BIOCHEMICAL EDUCATION 15(3) 1987