ontheuniversity.com

From an editorial in Nature:

Young scientists at a Chinese genomics institute are foregoing conventional postgraduate training for the chance to be part of major scientific initiatives. Is this the way of the future?

The approach to extended postgraduate training varies from country to country. The United States and Europe, for example, have long believed that students need to finish a multiyear programme of postgraduate work before they can fully participate in the front rank of research, whether in industry or academia.

In Asia, scientific communities instead tend to value directed, practical research. In Japan, for example, industry accounts for a much higher proportion of the scientific budget than in the West, and managers there often say that they prefer university graduates who they can train in-house. As a result, relatively little emphasis is given to academic postgraduate training.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this approach is at the BGI in Shenzen, China — the genomic-sequencing juggernaut formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute …. Some 500 Chinese university students have already signed up to join the BGI after they graduate this summer. There they will help to piece together DNA data from an expanding set of sequences for microbes, plants and animals.

For the editorial…