BEIJING, November 19, 2012 (City Weekend) — Beijing is going a bit science mad these days. Last week we profiled an expat who combines his love of home-brewing beers with his day job of studying the pheromones of the Japanese beetle. And then there’s the cool new Understanding Science series of talks where experts make their fields of research accessible to the masses. It’s clear that expat scientists are finding Beijing to be a fertile laboratory, indeed.
The Chemist
Chemist David Evans started making yearly trips to China to give university lectures in 1987, but decided to move here for good in 1996. “Back in the UK, my polite friends said, ‘You’re brave,’” he recalls. “The less polite ones said, ‘You’re crazy! What are you going to do there?’” While the response of his “less polite” friends seemed reasonable at the time, it actually turns out that Evans saw an opportunity that few others did back then: science taking off in China.
He has worked at the Beijing University of Chemistry Technology since 1996, a lab that has since become a state key laboratory. He and his fellow lab workers research “more efficient ways of using chemical resources,” working specifically with inorganic materials and making what he calls “chemical sandwiches.” He’s busy writing papers, doing applied research and creating products, building a bridge between his lab and the factories producing his products. Because many of the facilities and labs along the production chain are state-owned, Evans and his team get to be involved with the entire process, from developing a concept to delivering a finished product—an experience that would be much more difficult to have, he says, in the U.S. or EU.
Meanwhile, other foreign scientists and post-doctorate researchers are trickling into China, sometimes driven by a lack of funding or grant money back home, sometimes just looking for a change of pace, but always attracted to the bounty of opportunities offered by a country with what often seems like unlimited funding, top-notch facilities and a chance to whole-heartedly chase their scientific dreams.
The Dinosaur Lady
Jingmai O’Connor, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, came to China three years ago after finishing her PhD in the United States. Frustrated with the environment in the U.S., where she says “science is under attack,” the funding is terrible and a dire job market for scientists, it was an easy decision for her to move to China, where Mesozoic fossils are plentiful. That China is home to most of these kinds of fossils is very important for her in studying the evolution of dinosaurs into birds.
Though she gets paid the same as her Chinese colleagues—which is to say, not much—she gets generous research funding from the Chinese government.
“I have 400,000 kuai to spend this year,” she says, adding that she’ll use the funds to do field work and continue to travel around the globe to check out the world’s best fossil collections—an opportunity that will give her a huge advantage over other vertebrate paleontologists who have had less experience with various collections.
Microbiologists
Over at the Institute of Microbiology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Chris Vavricka, American, and Boris Tefsen, Dutch, are just two of many laowai working in the labs inside the gated compound near the Olympic Park.
Vavricka is involved in a few projects that are looking for new influenza drugs, including traditional Chinese medicines, and Tefsen investigates why different influenza strains behave differently in humans and why some strains cause more harm than others.
Their salaries are paid by the CAS Fellowship for Young International Scientists. Like O’Connor, Vavricka says he was rejected for every National Science Foundation grant he applied for in the U.S., but has gotten every grant he’s applied for here.
Though he’s surrounded by state-of-the-art facilities, plenty of colleagues happy to collaborate and a boss who is willing to order anything he needs, Vavricka points to something else that has made his work abroad so fulfilling.
“The whole idea of science is about exploring new things,” he says. “So, isn’t it a good mindset for a scientist to go out and explore something new to him or her?”
Tefsen has only been here since August, but he shares Vavricka’s enthusiasm for exploring a new environment, “Here, I’m feeling inspired and challenged. Everything is new here.”
Environmental Scientists
For scientists in other disciplines, the sheer size of some of China’s natural resources urge them to work here. Belgian Koen Blanckaert worked in Switzerland for 13 years before coming to China to pursue research work on the sustainable management of river systems at the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences (RCEES) in Beijing.
“China’s river systems are an order of magnitude larger than European ones, which makes the impact on society also much larger,” he wrote in an e-mail.
Unlike many people working in other industries, while adjusting to life and work in a foreign country, every scientist interviewed for this article said that they feel fulfilled with their work and that others find them and their work valuable. They’re not just “rented foreigners” here for show; they’re really conducting research, collaborating and contributing to their respective projects and goals.
“I’ve never felt like I got respect just for being a foreigner. I had to earn that,” Vavricka says.
He adds that he has a lot of freedom to work on whatever he wants, as long as it’s related to biochemistry and he’s getting results.
In fact, the only scientist to even point out negatives was O’Connor, who came up with two.
First, she says, in China some people can be “really good at faking things.” This is something we all know from trips to Yashow and the Silk Market, but in her industry it’s not fake Chanel bags and bogus Rolexes, it’s fake fossils.
“They’ll finish a partial fossil or paint feathers on one because they know it’s worth more money,” she says of the sneaky practices that force her to be incredibly diligent in her work.
The second issue is that Chinese scientists have access to a massive abundance of fossils, “so they get all the Nature papers, but they have to be very short.”
If checking fossils for painted feathers and only being able to write short articles for world-renowned science journals such as Nature is as bad as it gets, it’s no wonder foreign scientists are making their way here.
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