m******g
发帖数: 17798 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 Biology 讨论区 】
发信人: peoplem (我爱我家), 信区: Biology
标 题: 超级千人计划 中组部没吃错药吧
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Thu Feb 17 15:19:04 2011, 美东)
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6019/834.full
每个人给2300万刀？一年10个？这帮人没睡醒吧。。。
High-Priced Recruiting of Talent Abroad Raises Hackles
1. Hao Xin
How much would it take to get you to relocate to China? Would 150 million yu
an ($23 million) do the trick? If so, pack your bags—if you are a Nobel lau
reate, that is. Science has learned that the Chinese government will soon an
nounce a new initiative to lure up to 10 winners of prestigious inter nation
al science prizes—including the Nobel Prize—to China each year by offering
what may be the heftiest reward ever paid to individual researchers.
Some prizewinners may be salivating, but at least one prominent Chinese-Amer
ican scientist aware of the new program blasts it as a massive waste of reso
urces. “It is better to invest in a whole new generation of talent than to
buy reputation,” says David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research
Center (ADARC) in New York City. “Someone should step up and put an end to
this folly.”
The initiative will be a new component of the Chinese government's Recruitme
nt Program of Global Experts, commonly known as Qianren Jihua. Launched in 2
008 with the goal of recruiting up to 2000 experts from abroad over 5 to 10
years (Science, 31 July 2009, p. 534), the program so far has tallied 1143 r
ecipients, including 880 “innovative talents” to work at universities and
research institutes. The rest are “entrepreneurial talents” recruited to r
un high-tech companies.
Despite Qianren Jihua's impressive numbers, many observers say the program i
s foundering. Initially, it mandated that awardees spend 6 to 9 months a yea
r in China for a minimum of 3 years. Most recruits, however, have not signed
contracts or moved to China, says Li Ning, a public policy researcher at th
e University of Guam. The main reason awardees give for not having signed co
ntracts is that they haven't received start-up funds.
Qianren Jihua “is a huge disaster right now,” claims Mu-ming Poo, part-tim
e director of the Institute of Neuroscience of the Chinese Academy of Scienc
es (CAS) in Shanghai. That sentiment is shared by many contributors to blog
sites on Chinese science.
The new component dubbed “Top Qianren” is likely to make the program even
more controversial. Its first catch, sources say, is 78-year-old French viro
logist Luc Montagnier, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicin
e for co-discovering HIV. Shanghai Jiaotong University recruited Montagnier,
who intends to lead research into electromagnetic radiation from highly dil
uted pathogen DNA (Science, 24 December 2010, p. 1732), a phenomenon that ma
ny scientists dismiss out of hand. University President Zhang Jie and Montag
nier did not respond to messages before Science went to press.
In the original Qianren Jihua, the program's sponsor, the Organization Depar
tment of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee (Zhongzubu), provid
es each recruit with a $150,000 tax-free relocation allowance. Beyond this s
ubsidy, awardees must negotiate salaries and start-up packages with recruite
rs. Eager to please Zhongzubu, university and institute officials routinely
dangle start-up funds of $1.5 million or more to entice candidates—then fai
l to deliver, says Xu Ruiming, a structural biologist at CAS's Institute of
Biophysics in Beijing. Xiao-Fan Wang, a cancer researcher at Duke University
in Durham, North Carolina, says some Qianren recipients “sincerely wanted
to go back but have to reconsider when they see no research funding.”
However, the $150,000 incentive, sometimes doubled or tripled by local gover
nments, entices opportunists, Wang and others say. Problems that dogged prev
ious recruitment programs have tainted Qianren Jihua as well, such as recrui
ts padding their resumés and professors with full-time jobs overseas double
-dipping in China. Some Qianren recruits, Science has learned, are postdocs
masquerading as faculty members or are not full professors as the program an
nouncement requires. That doesn't appear to perturb Zhongzubu. “Coming from
overseas is the most important qualification of Qianren Jihua. All other fa
ctors, such as age, degree, or one's professional title, are not that import
ant,” says Zhongzubu official Zhang Dong.
The perception that a tide of opportunists is cashing in and that many Qianr
en awardees are holding out for even bigger carrots riles many Chinese scien
tists. In recent years, CAS has established a merit-based promotion and comp
ensation system, but “now you suddenly have people coming from the outside
getting paid four to five times more,” says Poo, who also holds a full-time
faculty position at the University of California, Berkeley, and does not re
ceive a salary from CAS. Qianren packages make “people really jealous,” sa
ys Poo.
Qianren may also inadvertently worsen a long-standing problem faced by Chine
se science: the paucity of talented young researchers. It is difficult to re
cruit good assistant professors in China already, says Poo, and Qianren Jihu
a, by requiring recipients to be tenured full professors or the equivalent a
t an overseas institution, essentially tells “the best and the brightest to
spend their most productive years abroad.”
Buffeted by complaints and misinformation, Zhongzubu has chosen to keep the
names of most awardees under wraps. The agency “does not want recipients su
bjected to criticism before they even begin working” in China, says Zhang.
But Internet users have collected some 450 Qianren names gleaned from Chines
e university announcements. Of known awardees, more than 300 have full-time
faculty positions outside China, judging by information on their employers'
Web sites. More than 100 have research projects sponsored by the U.S. Nation
al Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, with funding for
several years down the line.
Most of these awardees cannot spend six or more months in China, as the prog
ram envisioned, without reducing the commitment to their current employers.
To accommodate them, Zhongzubu created a Qianren category last year that all
ows recipients to spend as little as 2 months a year in China. The governmen
t expects fewer than 100 awardees each year to choose the short-term categor
y, says Zhang.
The failure to land many big fish has prompted Zhongzubu to cast for small f
ry. Last month, the government launched Young Qianren Jihua, which over the
next 5 years aims to recruit from overseas 2000 researchers under age 40. Th
e government will provide young recipients with a relocation allowance of ab
out $75,000 and research funds ranging from $152,000 to $456,000 over 3 year
s. Requirements include Ph.D.s obtained from foreign universities and overse
as work experience of 3 years or more.
At 1000 or so pay grades higher will be the Nobel laureates and other elites
who accept a Top Qianr en award. They'll never have to worry about funding
again. |
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