China challenges US dominance of science
LIKE many ambitious young scientists, Jose Pastor-Pareja came to the United States to supercharge his career. At Yale University, he worked in cuttingedge laboratories, collaborated with experts in his field and published in prestigious journals.
But the allure of America soon began to wear off. The Spanish geneticist struggled to renew his visa and was even detained for two hours of questioning at a New York City airport after he returned from a trip abroad. In 2012, he made the surprising decision to leave his Ivy League research position and move to China.
“It is an opportunity not many take,” Pastor-Pareja said. But the perks were hard to resist - a lucrative signing bonus, guaranteed research funding, ample tech staff and the chance to build a genetics research centre from scratch.
After decades of American dominance, Chinese science is ascendant, and it is luring scientists like Pastor-Pareja away from the United States.
In 2016, annual scientific publications from China outnumbered those from the United States for the first time.
“There seems to be a sea change in how people are talking about Chinese science,” said Alanna Krolikowski, a Chinese-science expert at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Foreign observers, many of whom were once condescending, now “are rather in awe at what the Chinese policies have accomplished.”
China is spending more on
More and more people keep coming, that’s for sure. Right now, China is the best place in the world to start your own laboratory. — Jose Pastor-Pareja, geneticist
infrastructure than the United States or Europe, and the nation’s middle class has ballooned - making relocation more attractive.
“More and more people keep coming, that’s for sure,” PastorPareja said. “Right now, China is the best place in the world to start your own laboratory.”
Collaboration between US and Chinese researchers is under threat, he said. Recent restrictions on H-1B visas sent a message to Chinese graduate students that “it’s time to go home when you finish your degree.” Since 1979, China and the United States have maintained a bilateral agreement, the Cooperation in Science and Technology, to jointly study fields like biomedicine and high-energy physics. In the past the agreement was signed as a routine matter, Simon said, but that’s no longer the case.
Pastor-Pareja, the geneticist who gave up Yale for Beijing, specialises in studies of cell biology using fruit flies - Drosophila melanogaster.
The field is struggling in the United States, Pastor-Pareja said, as funding has declined. In China, there are now 30 drosophila laboratories in Beijing, he said.
China has 202 of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers - 60 more systems than in the United States. The largest radio telescope ever built - a massive, 500-metre, US$180 million dish called the Aperture Spherical Telescope that hunts for distant black holes - is in the southern province of Guizhou, where its construction required 9,000 Chinese residents to relocate.
Chinese leaders recently unveiled plans to become the world leader in artificial intelligence, aiming to turn the field into a US$150 billion industry by 2030.
Within the scientific community, one of China’s most successful plans has been an aggressive recruiting programme called Thousand Talents.
One recruit, a Californian chemist named Jay Siegel, became dean of the School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology at Tianjin University. He encouraged Fraser Stoddart of Northwestern University, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2016 for his work with molecular machines, to set up a lab at Tianjin as a visiting professor.
“When the programme came out in 2008, it was almost perfect timing because of the global economic crisis,” said Cong Cao, who studies Chinese science policy at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China.
“It’s now been so successful, the programme has almost overachieved.”
China has also been ramping up the quantity and quality of its homegrown talent. According to National Science Foundation statistics, China has almost caught up to the United States in its annual number of doctoral degrees in science and engineering, with 34,000 vs. the United States’ 40,000.
Among the brightest of those home-grown stars is Zhao Bowen, a Chinese science prodigy who dropped out of high school to start running a genetics lab. Now 25, Zhao has launched a biomedical start-up focused on microbiome research and chose to locate it in Beijing over anywhere else in the world. — Washington Post/Amber Ziye Wang in Beijing contributed to this report