Tian Xu, Yale School of Medicine

With an impish grin, Xu admits that he spent his unhappy high school years in Jiaxing playing “Go”—a Chinese strategic board game. “I liked the game because you win if you are good,” he says. “It doesn't matter where your ancestors came from.”

Unlike the Go meritocracy, Xu's privileged family history made him “a targeted kid” during the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, which was hard on intellectual families like Xu's. His father, a teacher, was demoted to a labor camp; his mother was punished as a “capitalist roader”—someone with left-leaning political views who bows to bourgeois pressures. And Xu was mistreated by his school principal because he came from a politically tainted family.

The Cultural Revolution was only the latest blow to Chinese science, which had been damaged by the wars, political upheavals, and social turmoil of the 1930s and 1940s and then restructured along the Soviet model after the communist takeover in 1949. That ossified system— under which most research took place in Academy of Science institutes rather than at universities—became vulnerable to political favoritism, corruption, and domination by seniority. Then, starting in the late 1960s, Chairman Mao Zedong's “Down to the Countryside” campaign transplanted urban “young intellectuals” to rural areas, destroying the careers of many promising scholars who might have pursued science.

If the severe academic disruption had continued beyond 1978, Xu might never have attended college. But his application to Fudan University coincided with China's reform movement that restored merit-based admissions to universities. “Fudan really changed me,” says Xu. “The level of research was not high then, but the spirit of scientific exploration was tremendous.”

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That spirit may have been uplifting, but Xu and other Chinese undergraduates discovered that, to do first-rate science, they had to pursue their Ph.D.s abroad. After he met a visiting official from the City College of New York, Xu was accepted in the college's graduate program in biology. In 1983, the young student—who spoke virtually no English—arrived at a ramshackle house in Harlem with $50 in his pocket and the challenge of living in New York for a school year on a stipend of $1,500.

Many Chinese expatriates share similar stories. “At that time, China was not a good place to study life sciences,” recalls molecular biologist Min Han, a HHMI investigator at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who has been Xu's main collaborator in establishing the new institute at Fudan.

Sent to a farm during the Cultural Revolution, Han majored in biology at Beijing (Peking) University and was recruited to study in the United States—getting his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles—as part of a program created by the late Ray Wu, a Cornell University biologist who played a key role in recruiting Chinese students to U.S. universities during the 1980s and 1990s. Another talented scientist recruited in the same program was Xiaodong Wang, now an HHMI investigator at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. Wang recalls the “incredible culture shock” of his move from Beijing to Texas in 1985.

Even if they were not directly affected by the Cultural Revolution, many younger Chinese science students also headed to the United States because “you didn't stay in China if you wanted a career in research,” says neuroscientist Yang Dan, an HHMI investigator at the University of California, Berkeley. After she'd earned her initial degree in physics at Beijing (Peking) University, Dan was restricted by the rigid Chinese system from doing graduate studies in another field, so she decided to pursue a life sciences Ph.D. program at Columbia University in New York, where she had to work hard to catch up on basic biology and related courses that she had missed in Beijing.

Photo: Chris Jones

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