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Text | Alex Pine Han Zhi
Source: Qubit
Yan Ning returned to China full-time again, this time in Shenzhen.
Just today, Yan Ning appeared in Shenzhen and officially announced:
He will resign from the faculty at Princeton and return to Shenzhen to help establish the Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences and serve as the founding dean.
As soon as the news came out, it quickly attracted attention from all walks of life and reached the top of Weibo’s hot search.
Many professors and scholars forwarded the news for the first time:
There are also netizens in Guangdong who suddenly realized that it is no wonder that so many bigwigs pay attention to the Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences.
More netizens expressed their expectations for the big guy to return to China:
What is the origin of Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences? What will Yan Ning do when he returns to China this time?
Returning home full-time for the second time
Yan Ning graduated from Tsinghua University with a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. degree from Princeton, and studied under Shi Yigong, a well-known structural biologist and current president of Westlake University.
In October 2007, Yan Ning just completed a three-year postdoctoral research in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton.
At the invitation of Professor Zhao Nanming, Yan Ning returned to her undergraduate alma mater, Tsinghua University, as a professor of medical school and a doctoral supervisor.
That year, she was only 30 years old (Yan Ning was born in November 1977).
During Yan Ning’s time at Tsinghua University, the most striking achievements were:
In 2014, she led a team to resolve the three-dimensional crystal structure of the human glucose transporter GLUT1 for the first time.
After the achievement was published in Nature, it immediately received widespread attention and praise from the international academic community. Many scientists called this achievement “a milestone”.
Brian Kobilka, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, commented:
To develop drugs for human disease, obtaining human transporter structures is critical. The structural elucidation of GLUT1 is itself a very challenging and risky task, so this is a great achievement.
Ronald Kaback, an academician of the National Academy of Sciences and an expert on membrane transporters, said:
This is a major achievement in 50 years.
Harvey Lodish, an academician of the National Academy of Sciences and a professor at MIT, also added the results to the eighth edition of the classic textbook “Molecular Cell Biology” he was writing at the time.
Then in 2015, Yan Ning’s team further obtained ultra-high-resolution structures of GLUT3-binding substrates and inhibitors with more conformations, thus clearly revealing the molecular basis of the fundamental cellular process of glucose transmembrane transport.
…
In the blink of an eye, in 2017, Yan Ning, who had been a full-time professor at Tsinghua University for 10 years, chose to resign from a full-time position to become a part-time professor, and went to Princeton University to teach.
This move immediately aroused widespread concern and heated discussion among Chinese and foreign academic circles and netizens.
During his stay in the United States, Yan Ning was elected as a foreign academician of the American Academy of Sciences in 2019. In April last year, Yan Ning was elected as an academician of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, along with the famous computer scientist Li Feifei.
Regarding the reason for returning to China this time, Yan Ning said that he and Shenzhen were “on the spot”:
It is said that Shenzhen is the “Capital of Volumes”, but I agree with another nickname for Shenzhen: the capital of dreams, the capital of dreams.
Teaching at Tsinghua University and Princeton are the first two dreams of my life, and in Shenzhen, I will work hard to realize the third dream.
He also said that he “submitted a resignation application to Princeton University in a hurry.”
Construction of a new mechanism for the Academy of Medicine
Finally, I returned to the institution where Yan Ning was about to work: Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences.
In fact, Yan Ning’s return to China has long been traced. When the Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences was preparing for the establishment, it was already planned to carry out the “dean selection” work in 2020-2021. Therefore, some netizens speculated that Yan Ning had a long-term relationship with the Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences. contact.
According to the Shenzhen Health and Health Commission, the Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences is a new mechanism medical academy supported by the state.
The so-called “new mechanism” includes two aspects.
The first is positioning new.
That is to say, Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences is not only a pure research institution, but according to the official statement, it is also a “scientific research organization that organizes scientific research”.
Its core function is to undertake public management and service functions in medical science and technology research. In addition, it must lead the development of medical science and technology in Shenzhen.
To this end, the Shenzhen Municipal Government has also established the “Shenzhen Medical Research Special Fund”, which entrusts the Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences to carry out professional management.
The second is the new mechanism.
Indefinite establishment, indefinite level, independent post, following the principles of council governance and academic autonomy.
For scientific research talents, including the dean, a market-based salary and social employment system shall be implemented.
In September last year, the Shenzhen Health and Health Commission announced a wave of recruitment for management positions at the Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences.
The new mechanism is not only reflected in the personnel aspect. Although Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences is registered as a public institution directly under the Shenzhen Municipal Government, it is essentially a statutory body and implements “one hospital, one law”.
Specifically, the government will issue the “Administrative Measures for the Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences”, which can independently organize the academy in accordance with the law without taking into account the system of traditional institutions.
Where does the money come from?
It consists of three parts: special government funding, social funding, and conversion benefits.
The first is the special government funding, which is the “Shenzhen Medical Research Special Fund” mentioned above. According to documents released in May this year, the government allocated 28.48 million yuan to its budget in 2022.
At the same time, Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences will also set up a joint fund, accept charitable donations, introduce venture capital, and gradually explore the establishment of the “Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Health Technology Innovation Guidance Fund”.
In addition, another major source of funds for the Academy of Medical Sciences is the transformation and production of drugs and devices, and the profits from the transformation are directly fed back to itself.
Regarding the future development plan of Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences, there are two points to sum up.
The first point is to aggregate resources. Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences is equivalent to a medical technology collaborative innovation platform, which solves the problem of scattered allocation of domestic medical technology resources, avoids cross-waste of resources, and inefficient use of scientific research funds.
The second point is to help translate scientific research results. Shenzhen will allow scientific researchers to hold shares in transformation projects through “technical investment”, directly participate in the transformation process of scientific and technological achievements, and increase the enthusiasm for transformation.
In addition, Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences will also transform enterprises through “shareholding” through angel investment and other forms, and gradually transition from a single technology research and development to a scientific research industry hybrid.
According to the construction plan of the Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences, the Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences will be basically completed in 2025.
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