From Science Magazine:
“When I left China to study abroad, I thought I had left China for good,” says neuroscientist Shigang He. Yet, after earning his Ph.D. and landing a permanent research position in Australia, He started having second thoughts. A visit to a Chinese institute astounded him. Labs were bulging with new equipment and feverish with activity. And funding for individual researchers was nearly on a par with his in Australia. He made several trips back to China, he says, “to make sure I wasn’t deluded.” Then he did something once unthinkable for a Chinese scientist established abroad: He resigned from the University of Queensland, sold his house in Brisbane, and joined the Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai, a part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
He’s not alone. Although numbers are hard to come by, repatriated scientists are multiplying. Officials at the Institute of Health Sciences, a part of CAS’s Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), say a third of the two dozen primary investigators who have joined the institute since its founding four years ago had given up permanent jobs overseas. “It is definitely a new trend, not only at SIBS but throughout China,” says SIBS President Gang Pei.
Those returning to their roots say the trend indicates how far Chinese science has come in catching up with the West. “It is no longer true that a faculty position in China is less competitive than one in the U.S.,” asserts Jianmin Zhou, a molecular plant biologist who left an associate professorship at Kansas State University, Manhattan, for a position at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing. In China, midcareer returnees bridge a gap between young scientists trained abroad and high-profile veterans who spend a few months a year in China as advisers. “These midcareer people help China” with their experience and administrative skills, says Pei.[Full Text]
