I visited The Hormel Institute as a visiting scholar. It is located in Austin, Minnesota, not far away from the most famous hospital-the Mayo Clinic. The institute is a division of the University of Minnesota (UMN), which was founded in 1942 and received significant support from the Mayo Clinic where scientists put their academic focus on cancer research.

    At first, I had no idea about why the institute was named “The Hormel” and located in Austin far from the UMN. After arriving at the city a couple of days, I took a tumble when I looked at “the Hormel Foods Corporation”, which is standing on the opposite of the institute. If you look back the history of the company, you will find that the Institute initially started with studying the food value of soybeans. And later it was expanded to study nutrition, animal diseases and food technology. Whereas only cancer research is conducted here now. 

    Currently, there are 20 cancer research sections and nearly 260 faculty and leading cancer research scientists, who are focused on accelerating answers to cancer by determining the basic molecular mechanisms of cancer development and finding better ways to prevent, detect and treat cancer. The section where I worked and leaned is “cancer epigenetics and experimental therapeutics”, headed by Dr. Shuju Liu, who have made contribution to the epigenetics research for many years, especially in the field of leukemia epigenetics and made excellent achievements. 

By Liu Bei/ Lin Juanzhen

Edited by Office of International Cooperation and Communication