A Chinese scientist says he's discovered there's much more in a name--a surname to be exact--than previously thought possible.

China's surname groupings appear to contain discrete sets of genetic material, the scientist found. Thus, a fact as simple as a family name may reveal a mountain of information about a patient's physical makeup and predilection to disease. It could even provide important clues to developing custom-designed drugs or discovering the secrets to longevity.

The surname-genetics-link contention comes from Yuan Yida, a professor at the Beijing-based Genetics Institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Yuan spent the past 16 years studying the origins of China's family names and the geographical distribution of their lines of descendants. In the process, he has taken blood samples from far-flung relatives to look for similarities in genetic coding.

"A valuable potential resource, the distribution of Chinese surnames will one day provide critical hints for a raft of hereditary characteristics and for cultural study," said Yuan.

His research is centered on the gender chromosomes found in the human body. Every human cell contains 23 pairs of chromosomes - tiny thread-like structures that contain the genetic material DNA. The final pairing determines one's sex.

Thus a father passes on both his name and certain genetic characteristics to his descendants via that chromosome pair. In China, the links are perhaps easier to study because of the long and coherent history of surname system.

Compared with Europeans and even other Asians, China has a relatively long surname history dating back more than 5,000 years.

In addition, people in some countries don't depend on blood ties for naming.

In Japan, for instance, people have more than 120,000 surnames, and most of them are related to places.

The relatively small number of surnames among the huge population is also helpful.

China's nearly 1.4 billion people share 22,000 surnames, the most popular being Li and the oldest, Feng. But Yuan discovered that perhaps only 100 family names account more than 85 percent of the population.

Yuan developed distribution maps showing where those families have migrated across China. And he collected up to 1 million blood samples to see whether he could find similarities within family trees.

After analyzing the samples, Yuan said he discovered key matchups in blood types, protein characteristics and enzyme performances.

He believes his research can help in finding therapies to cure some hereditary diseases, to research the secret of life expectancies and to help people who are searching for their ancestors.

"It's well known that the same drug can give quite different results on two patients with the same disease," Yuan said. "We may be able to design distinctive drugs according to surnames.

"Similarly, we may find the secrets of a long-lived person by studying his genes."

(eastday.com 09/13/2001)