China Entices Scientists to Return Home
WSJ; NOVEMBER 17, 2010,BEIJING—After eight years working in the U.S. at the National Institutes of Health, a major federal research center, cell biologist Li Yu decided in 2008 it was time to return to his native China and became a professor here at Tsinghua University.Dr. Yu is one of some 80,000 Western-trained Chinese scientists who have returned to China to work in academia or industry since the mid-1980s. In a report published Wednesday, the Monitor Group, a consultancy, predicts the return will accelerate over the next decade, and says the trend, coupled with an outpouring of investment by the Chinese government and private industry, will help China become a leader in research discovery in the pharmaceutical and health-care industry by 2020.A professor at Tsinghua University places a note among bottles of bacterial culture in a university lab in Beijing in June. China is ramping up efforts to attract top scientists who have been trained in the U.S. China is already the third-largest pharmaceutical market and is expected to grow by 25% to more than $50 billion in sales in 2011, according to drug-industry tracker IMS Health. But until recently, the West was the source of innovation in the industry.
"I think the big call to arms … is that the world is going to change, and China is going to be on many levels the leader, including life science innovation," says George Baeder, head of Monitor Group's life sciences practice in Asia and an author of the report. China is making a concerted effort to become a research powerhouse by drawing researchers back home. Two years ago, the government launched the "Thousand Talents" program with the goal of bringing back 2,000 scientists over five to 10 years by promising resources and funding, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Monitor Group says the program has offered qualified returning scientists up to 10 million yuan, or $1.5 million, each in resources and funding. Beijing also offers a variety of other funds to help academics and entrepreneurs kick off their work. China still has far to go to attain the overall level of research in places like the U.S. and Europe, and a variety of issues could impede its progress. China has yet to spawn a major global pharmaceutical company that develops its own products. China's research sector also struggles with procedural problems and fraud that render its research unusable for other scientists. Mr. Baeder says fundamental cultural changes, such as moving to a merit-based system of funding from one based mostly on who one knows, will be important to the country's progress in innovation. Some U.S. scientists and officials have been concerned that difficulty in securing federal grants for research—the primary mechanism by which much science research is funded in America—may be driving young scientists away from academia and basic science research. U.S. universities remain the most attractive in the world for Chinese and other foreign students in the sciences. China surpassed India last year as the biggest source of foreign students in U.S. institutions of higher education with 127,628, up 30% from the year before. But keeping Chinese scientists in the U.S. once they are trained is increasingly difficult. Dr. Yu, the former NIH researcher, was drawn back by the scientific possibilities in China that he feels aren't possible in the U.S. His large lab full of students, along with essentially unlimited research funds guaranteed to him by the government and the university, has allowed him to accelerate his work. As a result, he has been able to expand his basic-science research and think about applying it to the treatment of diseases such as neurodegenerative and autoimmune conditions. "The bottom line, I think, is we just get a better opportunity" in China, said Dr. Yu. "In China, anything can happen." For S. Benjamin Hua, an entrepreneurial spirit called him back to China after 20 years. He left in 1986 when the government paid for him to get his doctorate at the University of Maryland. Back then, people in China had "just heard about" biomedical research, Dr. Hua says, and going to the U.S. for training was seen as an opportunity and necessary step. He returned to China in 2007 because of the opportunity to launch a new company in a growing market, armed with the knowledge from his academic training at Maryland and the University of California, San Francisco, and from the biotechnology industry in Silicon Valley. Although his family remains in the U.S., and he travels frequently between the two countries, he felt he had to live in China to better understand and succeed in the Chinese market. Last year, Dr. Hua launched Hangzhou Avalon Biosciences, a clinical diagnostics company focused on infectious diseases and cancer, which has grown to 12 employees. Many of his peers are also returning to China, he says. For many, the language and cultural barriers in the U.S. mean expending extra effort to achieve the same level of success as native speakers. The erasing of that barrier with a return to China, coupled with the government's support, is appealing, he said.
China's goal "is to change from 'made in China' to 'innovated in China,' " Dr. Hua said.
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