The School of Basic Medical Sciences was established in January 2001 as the former Department of Basic Medicine founded in 1959. The School has assumed a teaching task of preclinical medicine for all majors and some public fundamental courses, as well as educational management for freshmen, sophomores and juniors of Clinical Medicine (seven-year and five-year programs) and for freshmen upgrading from junior college to university majoring in clinical medicine. The newly established majors of the School include Clinical Medicine (Clinical Pathology), which started to enroll students in 2007; and English (Four-year Program for Medical English), which started to enroll students in the fall of 2008.
The School has a well-structured teaching staff providing skills of a high quality. There are, 261 teaching and administrative staff in total. Among the 181 full-time teachers, 24 are professors, 51 are associate professors, 10 are doctoral supervisors and 45 are master supervisors. Among the teachers of basic professional courses, 40 hold Doctor’s Degree while 92 have Master’s Degree, accounting for 73% of the total.
The School has now set up seven academic departments, including Human Anatomy & Histology and Embryology, Physiology & Pathophysiology, Pathology, Pathogenic Biology, Immunology, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Cell Biology & Genetics, as well as two teaching divisions – Mathematics & Computer Science Division and Foreign Language Division. The School has established The Fujian Teaching Demonstration Center of Preclinical Medical Experiment, which is divided into five teaching laboratories – Integrated Laboratory of Functional Medicine, Integrated Laboratory of morphology, Laboratory of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Integrated Laboratory of Pathogenic Biology, Integrated Laboratory of Human Anatomy, all of which further promote the reform of experiment teaching in both content and methods.
The School focuses on discipline construction, while working hard on building research bases and developing programs leading to degrees. As a result, three research centers of Molecular Medicine, Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine and Neurobiology, as well as a sharing service center of large apparatus, have been successively established, promoting the School's scientific research and increasing the number of programs year by year. At present, the School has formed its own advantages and characteristics in Molecular Biology of Tumors, Infection & Molecular Biology of Immunity, and Neural Molecular Biology. Two programs of Pathogenic Biology and Pathology & Pathophysiology for doctor's degree have been set up, so do ten for master's degree, covering two first-level disciplines of Preclinical Medicine and Biology. Molecular Medicine has been granted as a key discipline of "211 Project" at provincial level. There are four provincial key disciplines – Pathogenic Biology, Pathology & Pathophysiology, Human Anatomy & Histology and Embryology, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology; seven provincial excellent courses – Pathology, Anatomy, Biochemistry, Physiology, Microbiology, Histology and Embryology, Functional Medicine; two high-quality courses for master's degree at provincial level – Medical Molecular Biology and Advanced Pathology; four provincial high-quality courses for master's degree approved to be constructed – Clinical Anatomy, Advanced Biochemistry, Molecular Virology, Immunology. The mobile station for postdoctoral scientific research of basic medical sciences was approved in 2009. The School has been equipped with such research institutes as Laboratory of Tumor, Laboratory of Genetic Engineering and Fujian Engineering Center of Reproductive Medicine. In the past five years, the School has undertaken more than 141 funded projects, winning the fund of more than 15,000,000 RMB in total, among which 9 are supported by Chinese National Natural Science Foundation, 13 by Ministry of Health or Ministry of Education, 45 by Fujian Natural Science Foundation, 53 by provincial health department or education department, 24 by Professor Fund of FJMU and 5 are key project of FJMU. In the 18 scientific research awards won by the School, 16 are fist prize for Provincial Scientific and Technological Progress and the other 2 are second prize. The published papers numbered more than 500, 35 included in SCI and more than 200 in CSCD.