A glittering future
The three winners of this year's World Laureates Association Prize say China faces an exciting era of research in mathematics, neurodegenerative diseases and molecular biology, Zhou Wenting reports.
Wesley I Sundquist, another winner of the 2025 WLA Prize in Life Science or Medicine, says that China is truly a leader in his specialty, which concerns the structure of HIV and host proteins that interact with the virus.
"Two Chinese nationals, one now working at Oxford University and the other at the University of California, San Francisco, are really the world leaders. It's also true that Tsinghua University in Beijing has been one of the world-leading centers for electron microscopy, and this is just exploding," says Sundquist, Samuels Professor and co-chair of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Utah.
"Electron microscopy allows us to understand biology by actually looking at structures inside cells now, and it's very clear that China is going to be one of the leaders in this area," he says.
Although not fundamentally an expert on drug development, Sundquist says that friends in the pharmaceutical field frequently tell him that synthetic chemistry is truly at the cutting edge in China.
