By Tony T K Lam

Countless biomedical discoveries have been made possible thanks to the hard work of graduate students. But students in China lack the same breadth of externally funded scholarship programs as their counterparts have in the West. If the Chinese government wants to strengthen its recruitment of elite graduate students from around the globe, it should expand the scholarship programs it offers.

China’s rapidly growing wealth continues to grab headlines, with the country’s yearly economic growth hovering in the double digits for much of the last decade. Buoyed by its economic expansion, two years ago China announced a special effort, known as the ‘one-thousand-talents scheme’, offering a bonus of 1 million renminbi ($150,000) per person to attract scientists who hold professorships in other countries (Nature 457, 522, 2009). There is a clear drive to entice top-tier faculty: just a year ago, BGI, a genomics institute based in Shenzhen, China, ordered 128 massive, high-tech DNA sequencers, creating an impressive infrastructure that any researcher in the world would want access to.

The push for elite research comes at a time when the country faces a real need for new medical solutions: almost half of the 200 million people in the world with type 2 diabetes live in China (N. Engl. J. Med. 362, 1090–1101, 2010). Many laboratories worldwide, including mine in Toronto, have research programs that aim to combat this epidemic. These research operations are made possible largely through externally funded granting agencies such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Because operating grants typically fund the daily salary of research trainees and staff in North America, the working capacity of a laboratory is greatly enhanced if the salaries of graduate students can instead be externally funded by a scholarship.

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