Fu was born in China but served on the faculty at Yale University and other U.S. Among the attendees were CheerLand representatives and Fu Xinyuan, a biochemist at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen. Watson got involved in fall 2016, when the head of Cold Spring Harbor Asia, CSHL's outpost in Suzhou, China, led a small delegation to the New York campus. Modeled after the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York where Watson served more than 4 decades as director, president, and chancellor, the center is supposed to start operations within a year and eventually employ 1000 researchers, Liu says. "Within 5 years, the center will be having a very strong economic and social impact, not only in China but worldwide," says Liu Ruyin, CheerLand's CEO in Beijing. The institute's backers insist the project is going forward. The research agenda is also veering away from what he expected. "I left Shenzhen rather pessimistic that the institute would ever be built," says Watson, who wonders whether the necessary funding will materialize. Flanking him were local officials, including a vice-mayor of Shenzhen, and the chairman and CEO of China's CheerLand Investment Group, which is bankrolling the effort to launch the center.ĭespite the glitzy ceremony, which included an evening-gown clad announcer and a half-day conference on precision medicine, the ambitious effort is raising eyebrows-and doubts. James Watson, the Nobel laureate who turns 90 this week, was front and center on a red-carpeted stage before an enormous rendering of a futuristic complex dubbed The Cheerland-Watson Center for Life Sciences and Technology, intended to rival prestigious biomedical research centers in the West. There was no mistaking the guest of honor at a 16 March event in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
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