Rise of the underdogs: why low-funded, unknown researchers are making a splash in China’s scientific research community

In the Chinese research community, Dr Han Chunyu was a “nobody”, at least by the yardstick of funding.

Throughout his decade-long academic career, the associate professor of biology at Hebei University of Science and Technology received 300,000 yuan (HK$357,000) in grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. That equals about 30,000 yuan per year, less than what a worker in a shirt factory makes.

Despite the lack of backing, Han has broken into the global spotlight. Working out of his modest laboratory in Shijiazhuang, he and his colleagues developed a new technology to edit the human genome with unprecedented efficiency and accuracy. The discovery could open the door to alternative approaches to tackling cancer and ageing.

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The research was published early this month in Nature Biotechnology and it quickly became one of the most viewed new articles, according to Nature.com, the website of the journal’s publisher.

“Very nice piece of work … it is great to see that it actually works!!” said Professor John van der Oost at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who had predicted the theoretical possibility of the technology in 2014.

“Han generated a splash,” agreed Dr Wang Jie, scientific editor of Cell Research. “Everyone is talking about him and nobody knows who he is.”

The surprise achievement by Han could be part of what’s being called the “spillover effect”. Amid China’s large investment in science and technology, universities are churning out doctorate holders, but there simply aren’t enough institutions or academic posts to give them all prestigious roles. They end up at lower-rung universities, working in anonymity, but with a crucial advantage compared to the generation before them – the internet and its wealth of research.