ABSTRACT
In 2007, shocking many of his peers, Rao Yi, a biologist, gave up his position as head of a scientific institute at Northwestern University in Illinois to take up a post as dean of the School of Life Sciences at Peking University. In 2008, the Princeton molecular biologist Shi Yigong also chose his homeland over the US after rejecting a $10m research grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and accepting a job as dean of life sciences at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.
