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Chia-Chen Tan (谈家桢, 1909–2008) was one of the most important founders of genetics in modern China and made great effort to the internationalization of Chinese genetics (Fig. 1). Chia-Chen Tan was born on September 15, 1909 in Zhejiang Province. He studied in missionary middle school and public high school successively before being admitted to Soochow University without examination. He majored in biology in university and became interested in genetics. After graduating in 1930, he entered YenChing University and learnt from Ju-Chi Li (李汝祺) (Fig. 2) who was the first Chinese student to receive a doctor’s degree from American famous geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan and was the only genetics professor in YenChing University at that time (Zhang, 2017). Following Wu Chenfu Francis’s (胡经甫) suggestion and Ju-Chi Li’s instruction, Chia-Chen Tan completed his master research on lady-bird genetics with several excellent articles. Ju-Chi Li recommended his article to Thomas Hunt Morgan whose lab was famous for research on inheritance and variation in fruit flies. His outstanding work got Morgan’s attention and appreciation, which promoted their cooperation later. After working at Soochow University for several months, Tan went abroad to Morgan’s lab in 1934 for further study and he got Ph. D. from California Institute of Technology in 1936 under the supervision of Morgan and Dobzhansky. In the following years, he published dozens of articles in international journals, which made him known by the world. Then he declined Morgan’s detainment and returned to China, being appointed professor in Chekiang University. During Anti-Japanese War, Tan continued his research on lady-bird and cultivated his first graduate students in Meitan, Guizhou Province. He then became head of biology department in 1952 and director of institute of genetics in 1961 in Fudan University. He was elected academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980. As an outstanding and prolific scientist, Chia-Chen Tan worked on several fields of genetics and made a large number of world-famous findings. When he was in YenChing University, Chia-Chen Tan worked on inheritance and variation in the color of patterns in the lady-bird beetles. Even during war times, he continued his researches on genetics of lady-bird and fruit flies. It was in this period that he made world-famous discovery about mosaic dominant inheritance of color patterns in the lady-bird beetles, which is still a classical example in modern genetics textbooks. In 1940s, he went to USA again to continue his research on mosaic dominance in the inheritance of color patterns in the ladybird beetles, which had a significant impact on international genetics (Tan, 1946). He considered lady-bird beetles as good model of micro-evolution. Tan figured out the genetic maps of autosomes in Drosophila pseudoobscura when he was in Morgan’s lab. Then he proved how gene evolved through repetition and differentiation by investigating the nature of the race-differential chromosomes in Drosophila montium (Tan, 1942). From 1960s he paid attention to radiation cytogenetics. His team chose Macaca mulatta as experimental material and tested the effect of X-ray and γray to Macaca mulatta. They expanded their research to environmental toxicology which was pioneering in China. Later in his life, Tan suggested the government supporting researches on human genome for the sake of protection of Figure 1. Chia-Chen Tan (1909–2008).