About 80% of Chinese scientists who have gone abroad to study or work in the previous decade have returned home and are now publishing high-impact, collaborative research. That is according to an analysis by scientists in China, Europe and the US who found that the lure of attractive initiatives such as the Thousand Talent programmes is helping to foster China’s rise as a global scientific powerhouse.
Cooperation was critical to the creation of two major scientific resources
A decades-old science and technology cooperative agreement between the United States and China expires on Aug. 27, 2023. On the surface, an expiring diplomatic agreement may not seem significant. But unless it’s renewed, the quiet end to a cooperative era may have consequences for scientific research and technological innovation.
The arrest of MIT engineering professor Gang Chen on Jan. 14 has drawn attention to the role of China in U.S. science and technology system. It’s not the first time suspicions have fallen on a Chinese-born scientist – Chen is a naturalized U.S. citizen – for work they conduct openly in the United States.
“What happened this time was an ethics disaster for the world,” according to Wang Yuedan, a professor of immunology at Peking University, as quoted in The New York Times. He was talking about the recent claim by U.S.-trained Chinese scientist He Jiankui that he’d successfully altered the DNA in vitro of human embryos that were later born as twin girls in China. If true as claimed, the edits he made would be inherited by any of their future offspring.
By at least one measure, China now leads the world in producing high-quality science. My research shows that Chinese scholars now publish a larger fraction of the top 1% most cited scientific papers globally than scientists from any other country.
The Nobel Foundation statutes decree that “in no case” can a Nobel Prize be divided between more than three people. So it may not raise many eyebrows that the 2017 award in physics went to just three scientists on the LIGO team for their “decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.”