A FAMOUS Chinese legend says Shen Nung (Divine Farmer), a mythical emperor born 3,000 years ago, experimented with 100 different herbs on his own body and became the nation’s first herb doctor.

The Shen Nung legend is probably folklore but the story of Wang Zhenguo is genuine.

Born into dire poverty as the son of herb collectors in the Changbaishan area of the country’s northeast, he set out on his research for anti-cancer herb prescriptions in the 1970s.

With no other help, he received recognition and respect only after a decade of solitary observation, research and experimentation.

For Mr. Wang, this meant trying out different dosages and prescriptions on rabbits, rats-and himself.

"I just took larger and larger doses on of a herb until it reached the maximum acceptable dose," he recalled calmly.

"Once I got my face all swollen because of one experiment."

His trump card research result -marketed as "China No. 1 Tian Xian Liquid" - has already been proven by the United States National Cancer Institute to have "80 per cent curing effect" on cancer patients. Mr Wang has received hundreds of letters from grateful patients in the United States, Canada, Japan, South Africa, Taiwan and the mainland who have benefited from his invention.

Mr. Wang was born in Tong Hua City, Jilin province, in 1954. He had nine years of schooling in the 1960s which was marked by memories of collecting herbs after school.

"My family was so poor that I had to collect herbs in the mountains to pay for my school fees," he said.

"I followed my parents and other collectors up into the hills and learned bits and pieces of knowledge about herbs through them." Once his mother had a headache, he went into the hills, picked some herbs and cured her.

"From then on I wished to become a doctor," he said. At 16, armed only with crude knowledge of herbs, he began studying basic Chinese medicine while he became an amateur doctor in the neighborhood.

"First I bought a cheap compendium of herbs in northeast China," he said.

"When I got more money I bought better references. Thus later I managed to buy Li Shihchen’s Ben Cao Gang Mu (Great Pharmacopoeia)."

Li was the 16th century Chinese scholar whose name is inextricably linked with his masterpiece, Great Pharmacopoeia, which described more than 2,000 drugs and presented directions for preparing more than 8,000 prescriptions.

Li has always been a source of inspiration of Mr. Wang since the beginning of his career. "Li only had six years of formal education, less than mine. But Li managed to compile his 1.9-million word classic. I therefore told myself that one can achieve great things by sheer willpower," said Mr. Wang, who has hung an imagined portrait of Li in his room since his teens.

Mr Wang’s self-tuition began in the mainland in 1969, when society was too busy with other things to be too concerned with Chinese herbal medicine. But Mr Wang persisted with his studies and in 1971 he joined a traditional doctor before he enrolled at the Tong Hua City Health School, where he received a basic training in Western and Chinese medicine.

During his stint at the school, Mr Wang came across an old woman and her 13-year-old granddaughter who inspired him to undertake a lifelong battle against cancer.

"I met the little child a day in 1972. Her grandmother was then dying from liver cancer. She knelt before me and in tears besought me to heal her grandma," Mr Wan said.

"I can never forget the incident. I told myself: "I must find a cure for cancer."

Mr Wang graduated from the school in 1975 and worked mostly on his own, spending his own money and sought loans until 1986, when his Tian Xian pills were listed as one of the fundable research items in Scientific Research Development Scheme of Jilin province.

Mr Wang traveled around the country, including to Guangdong province, to collect folk prescriptions and also ordered herbal prescriptions from overseas. He spared all his rice rations for his rats and rabbits and ate sweet potatoes himself. He built a brick laboratory with his own hands and when he needed to refrigerate some materials he dug a hole in the ground and buried them in the cool soil of his homeland.

Mr Wang made ingenious innovations from local traditions. For example, when he was a child his family prepared salted eggs for sale in the market.

"My family was so poor that they could not afford salted eggs for 40 days, the usual time needed, " he said.

"But my parents salted the eggs with a herb and that shortened the time to only 20 days."

Mr. Wang then assumed the herb could perforate cell walls to facilitate the absorption of salt. He later discovered that the herb could selectively destroy cancer-cell walls, so that other anti-cancer agents could attack cancer cells more effectively.

Mr Wang started his experiments in the early 1980s, all by trial and error, and when his father-in-law was dying from cancer in 1983, Mr Wang tried his first Tian Xian pills on him. That was a failure, for his father-in-law died a few days after he took a drug. Afterwards, no one believed Mr Wang.

"I visited the cancer patients of a hospital and asked them to try my pills for free. But no one was willing to try them, " he said.

Finally, in late 1983 , and old man took Mr Wang’s pills and recovered from cancer. In 1984 Tianjin Medical Research Institute confirmed the value of his invention after clinical trials.

No Mr. Wang has his own anti-cancer research institute in Tong Hua and his products are promoted by a Taiwanese company based in Hong Kong and used by patients in over 30 countries.

Mr Wang has since been invited to attend medical conferences and lecture worldwide.

He was presented "the best invention award by individual research in the world" at the "World Eureka Expo" in Belgium in 1989 and organization have recognized the importance of his inventions

Mr Wang’s Tian Xian products include pills, plasters, liquid and suppositories. The series also includes a liquid for cancer prevention.

The Tian Xian liquid, the star in the series, was found to be successful in treating early and mid-stage cancer; it has also been effective with some terminal cancer cases. About 80 percent of its content comes from herbs which profuse in the rich volcanic soil in the Changbaixiang region. The rest comes from herbs from other parts of the mainland and India.

Mr Wang’s products have been tried out by many patients in the West.

"I am not against Western medicine," Mr Wang said.

"Tian Xian Liquid can control and contain cancer tumours. It should certainly be used alongside Western medicine and surgery. Only that Western chemotherapy produces a lot of side effects."

He expects to achieve major breakthrough with an anti-cancer scheme complaining Chinese medicine and Western chemotherapy in the year 2000.