Earlier this year, Dr Victor Ling, one of Canada's best-known scientists, received some exciting news. He had to keep it under his hat for a while - until it became official - but he had been awarded the country's highest civilian honour. Becoming an officer of the Order of Canada was the latest in a long line of accomplishments for the cancer researcher. Ling arrived in Canada as a child and like many Chinese expatriates of the time, the move to a new country was expected to be temporary. It was his mother who decided to relocate from Shanghai to Hong Kong in 1948, during a period of political uncertainty. The couple imported and exported Chinese-made goods, and after two years, when it became obvious the turmoil on the mainland wasn't going to be resolved in the short term, the family moved on. Because Ling's father knew Canada through business dealings, they settled in Toronto, the country's biggest city. 'I was quite young at the time,' says Ling, 64, 'so my memory of Canada is from the perspective of a child. However, even at that age, I did find it remarkable that Canada had only Caucasians. There were hardly any Chinese in Toronto.' There were none at the school Ling attended. He says it has been amazing to see how well Chinese have integrated into Canadian society in the decades since. As a youngster, Ling was definite in his career plans. 'I became interested in science by reading a biography of Isaac Newton when I was in grade 8. After that I wanted to be a scientist.' He gained a bachelor's degree in 1966 from the University of Toronto and a PhD from the University of British Columbia in 1969, and then undertook post-doctoral training with Dr Fred Sanger at Cambridge University, in Britain. Back in Toronto, he made his first major discovery in chemoresistance, focusing his research on the mechanisms of drug resistance to anticancer drugs. When the University of British Columbia, the BC Cancer Agency and Vancouver's leading research hospital lured Ling to the west coast city, his arrival made headlines in the local newspapers. He travels in a professional capacity to China once every year or so and, over the past decade, has seen an increase in the ability of the mainland to undertake world-class research in cancer and life science. 'The leading labs in major universities appear to be well equipped by international standards and greatly improved from what I saw 10 years ago,' he says. 'There appears to be more of a desire to interact with researchers from other countries.' Ling has seen evidence of that interaction first hand; he was one of 20 scientists at the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre with the BC Cancer Agency who deciphered the genetic code of the virus linked to Sars, which broke out in Guangdong province in 2003. 'Canada is a good place to do cancer research because of the diversity of its population and the results obtained are applicable to people around the world,' he says.