On the morning of October 20th, researcher Jiawei Wang from CAS Center for Excellence in Molecular Plant Sciences was invited to be a lecturer at “Seeking Truth” Distinguished Lecture and gave a report entitled as "The Irreversibility of Age Process and the Secret of Perennial Plant Longevity". The lecture was presided by Professor Shuangjun Lin, the Vice dean of the department of Life Sciences and technology.

In this lecture, Jiawei Wang discussed two issues: "Why is age irreversible" and "Why can plants live forever". Without natural disasters, many perennial trees can sustain life forever. For example, the longest-lived European spruce is 9,500 years old, which witnesses the history of human civilization; the dracaena in the Canary Islands of North Africa is 8,000 years old, and the bristlecone pine in California can live up to 4,700 years. So why can these plants live forever? One possible answer is biodiversity. Using the annual herbaceous plant Arabidopsis thaliana and cruciferous perennial herbaceous plants as models, Jiawei Wang used genetics, reverse genetics, single-cell sequencing and cell lineage tracing technologies to find out the answer of those scientific mysteries: the irreversible molecular mechanism of age; how age regulates plant regeneration and the stability of stem cell genome, and etc.

After the lecture, professor Yan Feng, Vice Dean of the department of Life Sciences and Technology, presented Jiawei Wang with a guest speaker in the “Seeking Truth” Distinguished Lecture.