Opportunities in China Lure Scientists Home
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 20, 2008; D01
SHANGHAI -- Sheng Huizhen's life story is typical of immigrants who succeeded in America. After getting her PhD in biochemistry, she landed a job as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institutes of Health. She got a green card, bought a house in Maryland and worked her way up to visiting associate, senior staff fellow and, finally, the prestigious position of staff scientist.
But then she moved back to China. A federal law prohibiting the use of public money for research on human embryos prevented her from doing the kind of work she wanted to do. The Chinese government enticed her to return with $875,000 for a new laboratory she could use to do her research.
"Due to different culture and religious background, the public in China are more friendly for stem-cell research," said Sheng, 55, whose family remained in the United States.
Lured by grants, tax breaks, looser regulations and a scientific environment more open to certain types of experiments, China's long-lost scientists are coming back in droves. As the NIH and other U.S. research institutes complain about the tightening of in the nation's scientific budget, China has announced that it will double its research-and-development spending by 2010, to about $69 billion.
The returning scientists are reversing a trend that began in 1978, when Communist China first allowed students to go abroad. It used to be that when they left, they left for good. But in recent years, more than 275,000 have come back.
Many of these "sea turtles," as they are known, have returned with doctorates in science or engineering and are going to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the government-affiliated research institute, where 81 percent of the members are returnees. Fifty thousand of the returnees are starting their own companies, according to China's Ministry of Education, pushing the boundaries of innovation and of what's acceptable in medical science.
For example, Jiang He, 50, was a researcher at the NIH's National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute until 1999. The former Potomac resident is now chief executive of Frontier Biotechnologies in the central metropolis of Chongqing. The company works on anti-HIV products. .
"If I started all from scratch in the United States, I would have spent much more time looking for funding," Jiang said. "I probably could get only a few hundred thousand dollars and could only afford a couple of researchers. . . . Here we have 30 to 40 employees."
Ni Jian, 44, was a postdoctoral fellow in tumor research at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda and then went to work as a scientist at Human Genome Sciences in Rockville. He is now the head of Human Antibodomics, a company in the eastern city of Suzhou that harnesses antibodies to treat diseases like cancer.
Ni said he initially thought he'd stay in the United States forever. But a tycoon in China with liver cancer was looking into investing into a biotech company and approached him. Then the city of Suzhou gave him about $280,000 for his company and $130,000 for an apartment and cars.
They were offers he couldn't turn down. "Low cost, easy access to clinical materials, government funding and collaboration with experts are all advantages," he said.
Jin Lei, 54, was in the United States for eight years, at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina. He returned to China in 2001 to work on bioprosthetic heart valves.
Jin, who founded Beijing Biren Medical Technology, said the speed at which science is allowed to move in China is the main attraction for basing a company here.
"If I were in the United States, I think I'd never be able to create this company," Jin said.
Perhaps the most ambitious and most controversial work being done by returned scientists has been with stem cells.
Some stem cells can change into all the different types of cells that make up the body, leading scientists to think they can used to treat many diseases.
There's little controversy about the use of adult stem cells, which are contained in many organs and tissue but are less useful than embryonic stem cells.
In the United States, the use of embryonic stem cells has been hugely controversial. There is little such debate in China, where the government forbids the use of human embryonic stem cells for reproductive purposes but allows research on them and allows them to be cloned for medical purposes.
Li Lingsong, 45, who did his postdoctoral work on a National Institutes of Health fellowship at Stanford University and was a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia, founded a company that developed the first stem-cell treatment offered commercially. Dozens of foreigners -- including many from the United States -- have traveled to China for the treatment, because Li is allowed to use adult-stem-cell therapies that are still being tested in animals in the United States.
In the United States, sometimes scientists "cannot do more pioneering things . . . so China becomes the only place to come for this treatment," said Sherwood Yang, 39, a New Zealand-trained physician who manages the clinic in Beijing that uses Li's stem-cell injections. The clinic is a joint venture of the city-owned Tiantan Hospital and American Pacific, a health-care investment group run mostly by Chinese American medical researchers in California.
Opportunities in stem-cell research also lured Deng Hongkui, 44, back to China. He left in 1989 to study immunology at UCLA and New York University's medical school. Then he joined ViaCell, a biotech company in Cambridge, Mass. In 2001, Deng returned to China's Peking University to work on manipulating human embryonic stem cells into treatments for diabetes.
"China is in the stage repeating the period when the United States was developing the fastest," Deng said.
Then there is Sheng's work.
After 11 years at the NIH, she had learned a great deal but was frustrated. She had been researching mechanisms regulating early development and organ formation in mice using embryonic stem cells, which can develop into the multitude of cells that make body parts. Sheng thought it was time to study the same things using human embryonic stem cells. The money offered by the Chinese government gave her that chance.
She focuses on the cloning human embryonic stem cells using animal eggs. While adult stem cells are readily available for researchers, embryonic stem cells are not because of a scarcity of eggs.
In late 2003, Sheng announced in Cell Research, a peer-reviewed Chinese journal, that she had fused human skin cells with rabbit eggs to produce early stage embryos.
While some groups opposed to stem-cell research condemned her work for destroying embryos that they said were human in identity, other scientists expressed excitement that the stem cells her laboratory grew could be used to grow tissue for transplants.
Sheng said that while she's happy to pursue her projects in China, she still thinks the scientific talent and environment in the United States is the best in the world. In China, she said, she often feels lonely. China is "lacking a critical group of scientists in your field who understand your ideas," Sheng said.
"China has been learning, and will continue to learn, from the United States."
Researcher Crissie Ding contributed to this report.
- Re: Opportunities in China Lure Scientists Homeposted on 02/22/2008
yes, the economy here will trigger more scientists leave...
but their families are still here:)
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