China push to bring biotech talent home is paying off

Print 19 February 2016
Matthew Driskill / FiercePharmaAsia

China's output of academic papers in the biotech realm has grown in volume and quality over nearly a decade as efforts to lure Chinese talent in the biotech industry back home pays off.

Christopher Laing

Vice President, Science and Technology, at the University City Science Center Christopher Laing talked about the how Chinese Academy of Sciences boasted about its numbers, in an article written for MedCity News.

The academy was "proud to show me that the number of scientific publications from its faculty that had an impact factor at least equal to that of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, had increased from less than 10 in 2005, to about 60 in 2014, roughly equal to organizations like the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry," Laing said in the self-authored article.

Laing was part of the Zhi-Xing China Eisenhower Fellowship, introduced in 2015 as a fully funded four-week professional leadership program, bringing 10 mid-career U.S. leaders to China each fall.

He also cited Sichuan University, which told him that number of Scientific Citation Index publications produced by its faculty jumped to 3,000 by 2013, from a level at 2,000 in 2009.

Laing cited investments in talent by these organizations turned out to be a key factor in this increase – in particular, bringing Chinese talent back home. "The Thousand Talent program is a set of PRC initiatives established in 2008 to attract foreign expertise to China," Laing writes.

"Almost all academic institutions I met with proudly cited the number of Thousand Talent scholars at their respective institutions."

The Thousand Talents Program offers short and long-term programs, offering full-time positions to overseas Chinese applicants who have received their doctorates from distinguished international universities.

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