Hongkui Deng Cheung Kong Scholar Peking University Beijing

When the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced the 43 winners of its Grand Challenges in Global Health, Hongkui Deng was one of just two Chinese scientists who made the list. Deng won $1.9 million for a proposal to use stem cells to create mouse models for testing HIV and hepatitis C vaccines.

Deng may be one of China's most promising young scientists, but for years, he had little interest in his home country.

In 1989, Deng left China to enroll in a PhD program in immunology at the University of California in Los Angeles. He worked on HIV during a postdoctoral stint with Dan Littman at New York University, but decided the field was too crowded and switched to stem cells instead. In 1998, he became research director of the stem cell company ViaCell in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Between 1989 and 2000, Deng never once went back to China, and even lost his passport for a while. But when he returned to Beijing in September 2000, “it just gave me a shock,” he says. Expecting to see the country he had left behind, Deng was taken aback at the changes. “I realized China is very different than when I left, it looked like it was full of opportunities and everybody looked very happy,” he says. In 2001, Deng came back four more times. And when the Chinese Ministry of Education offered him the Cheung Kong Scholar Professorship at Peking University, he decided to return for good.

He now works on the differentiation of human embryonic stem cells into beta cells to rescue diabetes. He also put his expertise in infectious diseases to good use during the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Nature 439, 382–383; 2006) and has published several important papers about the disease.

Things in China have not always been easy, and at times he has felt isolated from scientists in the West, Deng says. “But it's getting better and better,” he says. “It looks like in 20 years, China built everything.”—Apoorva Mandavilli

Spotlight on China