The Rise and Fall of Life-Sciences Research in the Chinese Sub-Saharan Empire: From the U.S. to the Emerging World
If I were allowed to think about it, I would believe that Chinese agriculture will take off with a new breed of seed. As for the biomedical sphere, my predictions would be gene therapy, neurodegenerative diseases, metabolic diseases and cancer, helped by artificial intelligence (AI) and Chinese omics databanks.
The People’s Republic of China had new and internationally trained Chinese scholars, but when it was established in 1950, many of them were from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University. After the Cultural Revolution in 1976, this remained the case.
Chinese funding has caught up with US funding in mathematics, physics and chemistry. The National Institute of Health in the United States is the largest source of funding for medical research in the world. The funding difference has an effect on the lag in papers.
He’s also famously outspoken. In 2008 he refused to use his US passport in protest at the policies of former president George W. Bush. Rao criticized US policies during the COVID-19 pandemic after his uncle died in New York, and vehemently rejected the lab-leak theory. And he is an energetic advocate for China’s talent-recruitment schemes.
Rao Yi is a leading reformer of science and education in China. Rao began his career in the United States in the 1980s. After he returned to China in 2007, he introduced practices that have revitalized life-sciences research in the country, including the use of tenure and of peer review to evaluate academics’ merits. He holds a variety of leadership positions at Peking University in Beijing, where he runs a leading brain research laboratory.
In some respects, the United States is an outlier. Other parts of the world are taking a different approach to research collaborations with China, albeit at differing rates and levels of enthusiasm. There is a no-brainer for professors in South Korea or Singapore to work with China. Meanwhile, research collaboration with China is a priority for members of the BRICS group (an intergovernmental organization established by Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa) and for many low- and middle-income countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
One of the best ways to protect the research systems is to make the research transparent. Funding sources and data should be open and studies subject to rigorous peer review. The nature of open science makes it possible for progress in a single country to have a large impact on all countries. It is a regressive step to decouple at the present time.