Li Jian, aged 61, is a senior lab scientist at the Chengdu Institute of Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences， and has dedicated himself to scientific sketching (速写) in the area of animal and plant taxonomy (动植物分类学). Over the past 40-plus years, he has sketched thousands of animal and plant drawings with a scientific attitude and superb skills, presenting to readers more than 730 species on the planet.

Over decades of work, Li has developed a particularly keen eye that helps him identify even the tiniest features of animals and plants. “It is impossible for an animal to arrange every part of its body in the way we want it to be so that we can take a clear picture of it,” Li said, explaining the necessity of scientific sketching in research work. “Different from works of art, my drawings require a high level of scientific rigor (严谨),” he said.

In animal and plant taxonomy, species are often identified through tiny features. Take frogs, for example. Some have long fingers, while others have short ones. Some have fingers that are unwebbed, some partially webbed, and others fully webbed. The tip of their fingers can be pointed or round, and with or without long narrow cuts. “When I sketch, I must sketch accurately. Sometimes, I need to study the structure of my subject under a microscope before getting down to draw,” he said.

Usually, it took Li about ten days to draw a palm-sized animal. For complicated animals like snakes covered in scales, it would take him more than half a month. A big obstacle Li encountered in his work was the fading of the color in samples as a result of long-time immersion in chemicals. In this case, he would need to rely on known morphological (形态学的) characteristics of the samples and text descriptions to make his sketches more accurate.

“With the assistance of Li’s large number of high-quality drawings, China’s illustrated scientific publications rank among the best in the world,” said Fei Liang, a famous Chinese zoologist.

Lise Meitner was born in Vienna, Austria on November 7, 1878. She was the third child of eight children in the family. Her father Philipp, who was a lawyer, hired personal teachers to teach the children, and she learned mathematics very well. Music was important to the family, and all the children learned to play the piano. The Meitner children were taught to listen to their parents, but to think for themselves.

When Lise Meitner finished school at the age of 14, she could not go to college for higher education, as were all girls in Austria. But, inspired by the discovery of Henri Becquerel, she was determined to study radioactivity (放射性).

When she turned 21, women were finally allowed into Austrian universities. Meitner was admitted into the University of Vienna; there she was excellent at math and physics and earned her doctor’s degree in 1906. She wrote to Marie Curie, but there was no room for her in the Paris lab, so Meitner made her way to Berlin. There she worked with Otto Hahn, but as an Austrian Jewish woman, she was excluded from the main labs and allowed to work only in the basement.

In 1912, the pair moved to a new university and Meitner had better lab equipment. Though Meitner was forced to escape Nazi Germany in 1938, they continued to co­work. Meitner continued her work in Sweden and later they found the phenomenon “nuclear fission (核裂变)”. The discovery, which finally led to the atomic bomb, won Hahn the Nobel Prize in 1944. Meitner, ignored by the Nobel committee (委员会), refused to return to Germany after the war and continued her atomic research in Stockholm into her 80s.