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Vaccine expert Hu Haitao, who studied under Drew Weissman, the Nobel laureate and pioneer of mRNA biology, has given up his tenured position at a US research institute and returned to China – a decision that required little explanation in 2025, he said.
Even just one year ago, people close to him would have thought it “unbelievable” that he might give up an academic career established over nearly two decades in the United States, Hu told the South China Morning Post.
But academic prospects in the US had become more “uncertain and unpredictable” in the past year and “you don’t have to explain too much because people would say it’s a good choice”, he said.
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Speaking to the Post on December 11, just days after arriving in Beijing to join the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ (CAS) Institute of Microbiology as a principal investigator, Hu said the career move was mainly for personal and family reasons.
The former associate professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Texas Medical Branch said his research, including the securing of funding, was not directly affected by politics.
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However, he observed there was widespread sentiment among scientists in his field that the US was less supportive of biomedical research and was cutting funding in related fields, including mRNA development.
