In 1983 two doctors, one from each side of the world, decided to
form a partnership, and so began a scientific adventure that would
improve the odds that babies could be born healthy and whole.
Neural tube defects that severely disabled or killed babies were
epidemic in China (where the folk term was guai tai--roughly
""monster baby""--for an infant whose embryonic neural tube doesn't
completely close and whose head and neck may be misshapen or spine
may protrude) and a significant problem in the United States,
leading teams of researchers from the United States and China to
combine forces to recruit more than 285,000 Chinese women and to
follow nearly 250,000 pregnancies in an epidemiological study.
Sixteen thousand staff were involved in running the project, which
encountered massive bureaucratic obstacles as well as cultural
differences, politicking for study designs and funding, the crisis
of Tiananmen Square, and testy debates over research ethics.
Nevertheless, the researchers persevered in a collaboration that
lasted more than three decades and led to landmark findings on the
role of folic acid in preventing spina bifida. Fortifying cereal
grain products with folic acid became routine in the United States
and a growing number of nations around the world: that intervention
was named one of the ten great public health achievements of the
last decade.
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