WU JI: Upward bound | NANCY IP: Making connections | NIENG YAN: Crystal connoisseur |CAIXIA GAO: Crop engineer | CUI WEICHENG: Deep diver | WANG YIFANG: Particle power |QIAOMEI FU: Genome historian | QIN WEIJIA: Polar explorer | CHEN JINING: Pollution patrol |CHAOYANG LU: Quantum wizard

WU JI: Upward bounddirector-general of China’s National Space Science Center (NSSC) in Beijing since 2003, a much bigger turning point came almost three years earlier.

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On 11 January 2011, he learned that his centre, which is a division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), had won funding for a flotilla of spacecraft dedicated to scientific discovery. Up to that point, say Wu and others, almost all of China’s space missions had been geared primarily towards advancing national prestige or demonstrating technological prowess.

The 2011 announcement marked the culmination of more than a decade of research, persuasion and international collaboration, mainly on the part of Wu — and the start of a new era in Chinese science. “China has changed direction, and he has been the most important player,” says Roger-Maurice Bonnet, former director of science at the European Space Agency, who is an adviser to the NSSCand a scientist at the non-profit International Space Science Institute in Bern.

Two of the NSSC missions have launched. One of them is Wukong, a space telescope hunting for signs of dark matter, which is thought to make up 85% of the matter in the Universe. “The data is coming down every day,” says Wu. The mission’s team may have an announcement by the end of the year that could “be a mark in science history”, he says.

Next up in 2016 will be the world’s first space-based experiment to probe the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, and the Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT), which will survey a broad region of the sky with greater sensitivity at high energies than other wide-field telescopes.

The funding for these missions has totalled about 3 billion yuan (US$455 million) since 2011, and Wu succeeded in winning the cash by persuading the top brass at the CAS and China’s central government that his agency’s proposals for basic space-science missions would deliver breakthroughs. That message resonates with the government’s push to invest more in fundamental research.

In person, Wu is hyper-focused on making clear that Chinese research must earn acclaim for its intrinsic value, not just because it is a first for the nation. “There is no Chinese space science,” he says. “Only science.”

Funding for space research remains a concern because it is allocated in five-year cycles, making it difficult for research communities to mature. But he is confident that space science will gain a steadier source of support — especially if the latest satellites deliver the goods — because both Chinese politicians and the general public increasingly recognize the importance of scientific discovery. “We are a big nation,” he says. “For human civilization, we should make contributions.”

NANCY IP: Making connectionsmajor brain project being developed in China. “I teach my students, sometimes you don’t know where research will take you.”

Illustration by Paddy Mills

NIENG YAN: Crystal connoisseurcryo-electron microscopy, which for the first time is allowing researchers to study proteins in fine detail in their native environments, rather than as purified crystals. Yan says that one of the benefits of working in China is she never has to worry about funding and sees a bright future for structural biology there. “The sky’s the limit,” she says.

CAIXIA GAO: Crop engineersweeping through biology laboratories around the world. Her lab had already made mutations in 82 genes using an older technology, and the thought of switching to something new was daunting. “At first I felt some resistance,” Gao says. “And then we decided: well anyway, we have to try.”

After a year of frenzied work, her lab at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology in Beijing became the first to use the revolutionarily simple gene-editing technique in crops, specifically wheat and rice (Q. Shan et al. Nature Biotechnol. 31, 686–688; 2013). “If there’s any lesson we learn in genome engineering, it’s that you have to be very flexible and adapt to technology that changes every day,” says Daniel Voytas, a plant biologist at the University of Minnesota in Saint Paul. “Caixia has that ability to adapt.”

She has been doing that for her whole career. Gao went to university planning to go into medicine, but was redirected to agriculture. “Not my interest at all,” she says. “But my thinking is always: as long as I am in this position, I will do my best.” After a PhD in grassland ecology, Gao switched again by taking up plant genetic engineering at the seed company DLF in Roskilde, Denmark.

Gao had to develop methods for inserting foreign genes into grass, which was frustrating work, says Klaus Nielsen, research director at DLF. Many grasses are difficult to engineer, and each species — or even genetic variants within a species — may require its own special mix of growth conditions. Gao is famously cheerful, but there were days when Nielsen could tell that she was seething.

Even so, she pressed on. “Eventually, she could look in the microscope and see things no one else could see,” Nielsen says. “She was cracking the nut every time.”

During Gao’s 12 years at DLF, she cracked that nut again and again — by genetically altering several traits, including the times when key grass species flower. But European suspicion of genetically engineered crops left her with little hope that her work would leave the lab. “It was so difficult to bring a crop to the market — in the end, the work cannot inspire you any more,” she says. That issue, plus a desire to return with her children to her mother language and culture, sent her back to China.

In Beijing, Gao tackled genetic engineering in wheat, a crop that is legendary for its difficultly to work with, in part because many strains have six copies of the genome. Soon she was considered one of the best in the world at engineering wheat, says Voytas.

Gao is happy with her decision to return to China, where funding for agricultural research is a higher priority than it is in Europe, she says. The government has approved some crops developed with early genetic-engineering techniques, but such approvals have slowed, and China has yet to decide how it will regulate gene-edited crops.

Still, Gao is hopeful that some of her creations will reach the market. Meanwhile, a disease-resistant wheat engineered in her lab is being further developed by a company in the United States. Ever the optimist, Gao refuses to accept public fears about genetically modified organisms (GMOs). “If I meet some people in the street and I ask, they will say they don’t want GMO at all,” she says. “And I stop there and educate them. They are so surprised.”

Illustration by Paddy Mills

CUI WEICHENG: Deep diverbuild a 50–100-kilometre circular particle collider to succeed the 27-km-circumference Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

The plan is bold, particularly for a country whose biggest existing collider ring is less than 250 metres long. Wang’s plan entails building two machines: the first would explore the Higgs boson starting in around 2028; its follow-up would occupy the same tunnel and smash particles with up to seven times the energy of the LHC.

China will have to compete against CERN, which also wants to host a post-LHC machine. Although China remains the underdog, Wang’s scheme has captured increasing support, says Nima Arkani-Hamed, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, whom Wang brought on board to lead IHEP’s Centre for Future High Energy Physics in 2013. “Now it’s not purely fantasy. It has a chance of really happening,” he says.

Wang says that he only dared to pitch the project because of the success of China’s Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment. He led that multinational collaboration, which beat international rivals in 2012 by measuring a parameter that governs transformations in the ghostly particles.

At more than 250 times the price of Daya Bay, the Chinese mega-collider will be a harder sell. China’s government has yet to say whether it will foot the facility’s estimated US$6-billion bill. Brian Foster, a physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, says that Wang has proved he can get major projects off the ground and bring in international support.

And one of his best attributes is persistence, says Shing-Tung Yau, a mathematician at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “He usually succeeds.”

QIAOMEI FU: Genome historianredraft the historyof Europe’s earliest modern humans. She returned to China in January to lead an ancient-DNA lab at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing, where she is set to bring the same upheaval to Asia’s ancient past.

She joined Pääbo’s team just as it was putting the finishing touches to a draft Neanderthal genome. “It was really high pressure. There were a lot of really interesting things, and a lot of scary things for me,” says Fu. “I came there at really the right time.” Fu learned how to harvest the scant DNA in ancient bones and quickly picked up evolutionary genetics, bioinformatics and computer programming to analyse the data that she was generating.

Her focus soon turned to the early modern humans who settled Eurasia after leaving Africa, and Fu began collecting and analysing their bones and teeth. She has sequenced the oldest Homo sapiens DNA on record: from a 45,000-year-old thigh bone from Siberia and a 40,000-year-old jawbone from a man who had a Neanderthal ancestor in the previous 4–6 generations. Her efforts — culminating in a study of 51 individuals who lived between 14,000 and 37,000 years ago — have shown that Ice Age Europe was more tumultuous than many had thought, with waves of migrants moving in and around the continent and contributing to the ancestry of contemporary Europeans.

Asia’s early history may have been even more dramatic than that, because several groups of archaic humans probably coexisted with modern humans, says María Martinón-Torres, a palaeo-anthropologist at University College London who works in China. Fu will turn her attention to the first Homo sapiens to settle Asia, who might have arrived more than 100,000 years ago. She also hopes to study Asian history as recent as a few thousand years ago — the IVPP has a vast collection of ancient human bones that have yet to be sampled for DNA.

Fu is often asked why she returned to China instead of staying in the West. “I’m curious what happened in China and east Asia,” she responds, “I think it was time to come back.”

Illustration by Paddy Mills

QIN WEIJIA: Polar explorerChina’s Kunlun station on Dome A in 2009.

The country is a relative late comer to polar research, but the Chinese government is investing heavily in both the Arctic and Antarctic, driven by the desire for natural resources and for a bigger say in international discussions about the regions.

Last December, an international team flew ice-penetrating radar and other sensors on China’s first fixed-wing aircraft on the continent as it traversed back and forth across thousands of square kilometres over Princess Elizabeth Land in Eastern Antarctica to map features under the ice. “It was the first survey of its kind in a part of Antarctica we know very little about,” says Martin Siegert, a glaciologist at Imperial College London. “The results are spectacular.”

The team discovered the longest canyon on Earth and one of the largest areas of melt under the ice sheet, says Qin, who led the 2015–16 expedition.

Looking forward, he hopes that China will be able to retrieve the oldest ice on the planet from Dome A, which will help to uncover the history of the Antarctic ice sheets and how they have changed. “Only then,” says Qin, “can we predict how they will respond to a changing climate”.

CHEN JINING: Pollution patrola new law that expanded the agency’s regulatory powers. He pushed for additional authority to investigate and prosecute polluters, and in May that request was granted. This makes it easier for Chen to intervene when local officials fail to implement many of the government’s policies on pollution and development.

In addition to cracking down on pollution, Chen’s ministry has worked to strengthen environmental assessments and has boosted transparency by posting more environmental monitoring data on its website, including air-quality readings, as well as information about its enforcement activities.

Chen has often shunned contact with the media, but fellow -scientists say that he has been willing to -listen to and collaborate with outside -scientists and international experts on issues such as air quality.

“He once said that the history of China’s environmental protection is a history of international cooperation on environment and development,” says Lailai Li, who heads the Beijing office of the World Resources Institute, on whose board Chen once sat.

The minister still faces huge challenges, however. Citizens are increasingly demanding that the government clean up the environment, but China’s rapid industrial rise has created a backlog of problems. Cleaning up the air in major cities may be the easiest task facing Chen; regulators are only beginning to grasp the extent of the water and soil contamination.

And government authorities continue to approve industrial projects, even when the environmental costs are all too clear, says Dasheng Liu, an environmental engineer and research fellow at the Shandong Institute of Environmental Science in Jinan. “He has more power than before,” Liu says, but he also faces “more arduous and heavy responsibilities.”

Illustration by Paddy Mills

CHAOYANG LU: Quantum wizard‘entanglement’, in which the quantum states of different particles are linked regardless of how far apart they are. He has entangled eight photons at once — a world record — and has submitted work using ten. Those achievements led Anton Zeilinger, a quantum physicist at the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology, to call Lu a “wizard of entangled photons”. He has also done groundbreaking work with his mentor, Pan Jian-Wei, in the related phenomenon of quantum teleportation, in which a quantum state is transported from one particle to another.

It was Pan who encouraged Lu to do his PhD work at the University of Cambridge, UK, and who convinced him to return to China with the promise that the government is investing heavily in quantum information technologies, and that bright young physicists could focus on research rather than funding. Lu’s goal is to advance quantum entanglement enough to use it for computations. “It will be exciting to see, for the first time, a task where a quantum machine can do a better job than a classical one can,” says Lu.

Nature

534,

456–461

(23 June 2016)

doi:10.1038/534456a