Lee Chen-yuan was born in 1915 and graduated from the medical faculty of Taihoku Imperial University in 1940, joining Du Tsung-ming's pharmacology laboratory and spending his career on the venom of Taiwan's snakes. In 1963 he and his students isolated α-bungarotoxin from the venom of the banded krait. It binds specifically to acetylcholine receptors at the junction of nerve and muscle, and became the standard tool worldwide for studying them.

He was elected to Academia Sinica in 1970 and became dean of the NTU College of Medicine in 1972. He had never been involved in politics.

In 1991, after the Independent Taiwan Association case, the Statute for the Punishment of Sedition had been repealed but Article 100 of the Criminal Code still allowed speech to be prosecuted. That September, aged seventy-six, he joined Lin Shan-tien, Chen Shih-meng and others in founding the Article 100 Action Alliance, with two demands: against the parade, abolish the evil law. On 8 October they sat in at the basic medical sciences building of the NTU College of Medicine; before dawn on the 10th police cleared them, carrying the white-haired professors and doctors out one by one.

On 15 May 1992 the Legislative Yuan amended Article 100, and speech and association were no longer sedition. He died in 2001, aged eighty-six.