Both of my parents received post-graduate degrees in the USA and believed that this training was essential to their career development. Thus, they intended to send all of their children to the USA for post-graduate study. However, the timing of their plan had to be accelerated due to the civil war in China.
In 1948, it just so happened that my father was in the USA as a visiting professor. Originally he had planned to return to Beijing in 1949, but these plans changed, because the civil war had disrupted classes at the university my siblings and I were attending. Furthermore, our home was invaded in November 1948 by a hundred high school students from the City of Taiyuan who flew to Beijing to avoid being hurt by the troops who had surrounded the city. My father, seeing the problems and uncertainties, decided to stay in the USA where he would be in a better position to help his five children gain admission to study in the USA starting in July 1949. After receiving my Ph.D. degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, and working at the Public Health Research Institute in NYC, I was appointed as an Associate Professor at Cornell University in 1966.
In the spring of 1980, I was invited to give six lectures on recombinant DNA at the Institute of Cell Biology, Chinese Academy of Science, in Shanghai. During my trip, I had an opportunity to meet with many relatives and old friends after 31 years of separation. My relatives and classmates from high school and college in Beijing all had college-aged children by 1980 and their greatest wish was to send them to the USA to study. In fact, my wife and I invited one of my nieces in Shanghai to live with us in Ithaca and enrolled her in Cornell University in September 1980.
I thought it would be highly desirable and extremely helpful to have a mechanism that would help many students majoring in biology to enroll in Ph.D. programs in the USA. Accidentally and fortunately, in early 1981, I learned that Dr. Tsung-Dao Lee, a Nobel Laureate in Physics at Columbia University, had just started the China-United States Physics Examination and Admission (CUSPEA) program to help place Chinese students majoring in physics in many universities in the USA. I immediately contacted Dr. Lee about the possibility of initiating a similar program to help place biology students in the USA. He supported my idea and contacted high officials in the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The Chinese government responded positively and asked me to initiate a program, which resulted in the establishment of the China-United States Biochemistry Examination and Application (CUSBEA) program.
Between 1982 and 1989, the CUSBEA program placed over 400 Chinese biology students in the graduate schools of over 90 universities in the USA. Details of this program can be found in the Master's thesis, "The CUSBEA Program and Its Influence on the Development of Life Science in China," by Chen Xiaoke (Center for Social Studies of Science, Peking University) and Professor Zhang Daqing (Center for History of Medicine, Peking University). A shortened version of the M.S. thesis in the Chinese language was published in the Journal of Dialectics of Nature in 2006.
In retrospect, the timing of the initiation of the CUSBEA program in 1981 was excellent, because China was lagging behind developed countries in the West in training high-level scientists. This was partly due to the cultural revolution that had occurred in China, which prevented many college-aged students from getting a college education between 1966 and 1977. As a result, many talented students between the ages of 18 and 30 were waiting for an opportunity to attend college. When the National Entrance Examination was resumed in 1977, only the very top students were selected to attend college. These students graduated in 1981, and many of them were not only very intelligent, but also highly motivated. Many hoped to have an opportunity to obtain advanced training in the USA. From the American perspective, contact between China and the USA had been interrupted for over 30 years (between 1949 and 1981); thus U.S. universities had no reliable way of evaluating the credentials of Chinese applicants, which were based solely on transcripts and recommendation letters, without GRE or TOFEL scores.
In the 1980s, there were many more outstanding biology students who wished to study in the USA than the limited quota of the CUSBEA program allowed, which was set by the MOE. However, since the students who came to the USA in 1982 and 1983 had performed so well, U.S universities started to notice and appreciate the high quality of Chinese students. As a result, starting in 1984, many Chinese students were accepted when they applied on their own. This was especially true in universities that already had a CUSBEA student. In other words, the CUSBEA program opened the door to encourage universities in the USA to accept Chinese students. Between 1984 and 1989, there were probably a thousand non-CUSBEA students who came to the USA to pursue higher education.
Starting in 1987, when the first group of CUSBEA students received Ph.D. degrees, the CUSBEA committee, with the help of the Chinese Consulate in New York, held a scientific symposium that invited all Chinese biology students enrolled in the USA to attend. The goal was to unite all of these students regardless of whether they came through the CUSBEA program or on their own. Additional symposia were held in Boston in 1989 and in New York City in 1992. After that, similar symposia were organized by former CUSBEA students and, with the help of Professor Xiaocheng Gu, were held at Peking University every year between 1993 and 1998. Starting around 1998, many top former CUSBEA and non-CUSBEA students became leaders in their fields, and joined forces to help different research and teaching programs in China. Thus, the CUSBEA program fulfilled an important historical mission at the right time, some 25 years ago. We can anticipate that in the next 25 years, Chinese scientists will continue to do well and become major contributors to the advancement of life sciences throughout the world.
