Yang Sui traveled halfway around the world when she left home the first time.
She had lived all her life in Wuhan, China’s fourth largest city, famous for its five big universities, including three medical schools. Yet when she decided she wanted to be a scientist, she would consider only the United States as the place to learn.
“Nope” is her very Americanized response to questions about alternatives. “I knew this was what I was going to do. I knew it was what I wanted from a career and I’m going to do it.”
“America is the dream of most students, I think especially for graduate education,” says fellow graduate student Chunying Li. “It’s the most advanced education system in the world.” Mrs. Li, along with husband Dong Yuan, left the Chinese city of Dalian to come to the United States and the Medical College of Georgia. She was studying physiology at Dalian Medical University when her first contact with patients made the shy, intelligent young woman decide that the best place for her was a research lab. “You are always asking yourself questions, then looking for the answer. The process is fascinating to me.”
Mrs. Li admits she was hesitant to leave her homeland, but like Ms. Sui, she had a goal. “I was excited to go, overwhelmed.”
She was preparing for her first test at MCG when the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 tested the mettle of her new home and its relationship with the world.
Ms. Sui, who came two years later, had to brave the security aftermath of Sept. 11 along with contagion concerns of severe acute respiratory syndrome, the deadly viral respiratory illness that surfaced in southern China in 2002 and rapidly became a global threat.
There was even trouble at her back door. A fellow senior at Wuhan University was caught altering his transcripts, probably to make himself more competitive in the United States. The word spread to other American universities to double-check transcripts of Wuhan students.
“2003 was a hard year,” she says. Sixty of her fellow seniors applied to American universities. Ten got accepted and six got the visas needed for overseas travel. She felt determined and lucky to be among them.
Campus
Transformation
Not unlike a well-executed scientific study, the concerted effort to grow MCG’s strength in biomedical sciences over the last five years has transformed the campus.
“We are developing an international reputation in cardiovascular research as well as neuroscience, infection and inflammation, cancer biology and diabetes,” says Dr. Matthew J. Kluger, vice president for research and dean of the School of Graduate Studies. “By focusing in thematic areas, we are getting that reputation.”
MCG is amassing record levels of researchers, funded research – which has increased 175 percent since 1999 – and construction activities to appropriately house it all.
One of many results of the unprecedented research activity is the need for more graduate students. “Students are bright, creative. They see things with naďve eyes and sometimes they uncover things you may not have thought about,” says Dr. Kluger. “The majority of faculty members really enjoy training doctoral students. It’s part of the reason they are in academia and not working at a pharmaceutical company.”
A few years ago, MCG was recruiting about 12 graduate students each year in the biomedical sciences. This year, MCG recruited 20 new students; the next goal is 30 per year, then 34. Graduate programs in biomedical science include biochemistry, cellular biology and anatomy, molecular medicine, pharmacology, physiology, vascular biology and oral biology. Programs in neuroscience, cancer biology and genomic medicine are in the works.
Like most graduate programs in the United States – and unlike many programs in Georgia’s health sciences university – graduate student recruitment in the biomedical sciences is an international affair.
“We are looking nationwide and worldwide,” says Dr. Gretchen B. Caughman, associate dean of the School of Graduate Studies. About 60 percent of current graduate students are from the United States and about 70 percent of those are from Georgia. By comparison, all students in the School of Dentistry and the vast majority in the School of Medicine are Georgia residents.
Despite the terrific international reputation of the United States when it comes to science, underscored by the fact that a disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners are from this country, “we don’t emphasize math and science in secondary education,” Dr. Caughman says.
The countless career options available to many Americans may further diminish their appetite for science. “We have about 300 million Americans,” says Dr. Kluger. “Some other countries have much larger populations hungry for the opportunity to excel, like the immigrants who came to this country in the 1880s and early 1900s.”
The good news is the image of scientists as odd individuals with pocket protectors living in ivory towers is melting away as science and scientists become more visible on the American landscape, Dr. Caughman says. Major accomplishments such as important drug discoveries and mapping the human genome have helped dismantle the towers and crystallize the important contributions of scientists to society.
And while MCG is ripe for development of even more future scientists, Drs. Kluger and Caughman worry more global concerns could hamper growth.
Changing World
The available pot of research funding is one worry. While Ms. Sui noted the United States’ strength not just in graduate education, but in funding the research laboratories that are the focal point for such an education, the heyday for research funding may be over. The recent doubling of the National Institutes of Health budget, which took it to about $28 billion over a five-year period, is complete. “Last year, the NIH budget only went up 3 percent, which does not even keep up with inflation,” says Dr. Kluger. President Bush’s proposed budget includes a .7 percent increase this year.
“When
about one out of four grants is getting funded, it’s a much easier sell to
undergraduate and graduate students watching the success of their mentors,” he
says. “Now, we are going to rapidly get back to the point where one out of six
or seven grants is going to get funded. That can be a turnoff to students who
wonder how they can get funded when faculty member X, a brilliant person who has
published 100 papers, can’t get funded.”
They also worry that ongoing international turmoil will hinder bringing students such as Ms. Sui and Mrs. Li onboard.
“This country has been very welcoming in the past to international students,” says Dr. Kluger. Like any good relationship, that influx of talent has been good for U.S. science.
But those on the front line of immigration issues for MCG say although the rules are evolving, the system works for most students most of the time.
When Beverly Y. M. Tarver became director of student diversity in July 2001, she was told that international visitor advisement – helping non-immigrant, alien students and scholars get to this country and stay long enough to complete their education – would be about one-third of her job.
“Then four planes crashed and that doubled,” says Mrs. Tarver. Her duties include administering MCG’s participation in the U.S. Department of State’s J-1 program, which provides oversight for exchange visitors, including scholars and students at MCG. She follows mostly School of Graduate Studies students in another program, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s F-1 program for students. Before she ever lays eyes on them, Mrs. Tarver helps students get the paperwork they need to secure visas through the U.S. embassies in their countries, then keeps information about their activities flowing to the proper department while they are here.
As an example, she follows about 40 students and their dependents in the F-1 program and 80 faculty, staff and students in the J-1 program as well as their dependents. When the Center for Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine moved to the new addition of the MCG Interdisciplinary Research Building last spring, the change in work address for all those in the program had to be reported to the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, an electronic database the U.S. Department of Homeland Security instituted after Sept. 11.
These ever-changing requirements are not to be taken lightly by visitors.
About 25 countries considered state sponsors of terrorism, including Iraq, Iran, Morocco and Afghanistan, are part of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which means non-immigrant adult males from those countries get even more stringent review, both before they can come and after they arrive.
The sheer number of citizens in a country – China has approximately 1.3 billion, as an example – may slow down the process in others. This year, of the some dozen international students accepted, two Chinese students did not get their visas in time to start classes. Mrs. Tarver never hears again from some students who have been accepted to MCG, presumably because they could not get a visa. “Some of them just don’t get through the process,” Mrs. Tarver says of the reality of international visitation in 2005.
“Is it more difficult than it used to be? Yes. Is it more time-consuming than it used to be? Yes,” says Mrs. Tarver, but she noted that as the international world has changed, the MCG world has changed, referring to dramatic growth in research and related activities that likely has generated more international interest.
“It’s more likely that if you are casting a broader net, you are going to catch more folks in that net that need assistance. They are going into a homeland security system that also is ratcheted up. More people, more requirements. I don’t know that one is more of an influence than the other,” she says.
Fitting In
Regardless of the extra effort it may take to get to the United States now, she is never surprised when students make the effort. “I have been other places and I know this is a wonderful place to be. There is opportunity here. We are not at the point where Martin Luther King wanted us to be, but we are further ahead than a lot of the rest of the world.”
Mrs. Li and Ms. Sui are glad to have found out for themselves.
“I like this program. I like my lab, my project,” says Mrs. Li. She works in the laboratory of Dr. Richard C. Venema, who encourages her to think and helps her answer resulting questions. His studies of the powerful vasodilator, nitric oxide, have led to her studies of eNOS, an enzyme responsible for nitric oxide production, and how its interaction with certain proteins can impact that production. The result may be too little nitric oxide, which may lead to diseases such as hypertension, or too much, which can contribute to sight-destroying diabetic retinopathy. “It is interesting and meaningful to do this. It’s a link between basic science and human disease,” a link she hoped to find years ago when she first ventured into the clinics of Dalian Medical University.
Ms.
Sui has set her sights on cancer research, which brought her to the laboratory
of Dr. Lan Ko where she studies a molecule whose erroneous migration may cause
several types of cancer. “I like cancer most because, so far, we have made a lot
of discoveries but it is not enough for us to find a cure. It’s a challenge that
really interests me. To study cancer, I need to know a lot about pathology and
molecular science, so I looked for a program that could integrate everything
together. MCG has this kind of program. It’s really good.”
She is happy as well to find herself in a place where she is free to pursue knowledge. “Everybody is willing to share their knowledge. They are willing to speak out on what they think,” she says. “In China, people are not so open-minded and so willing to share, maybe because of the traditions,” says Ms. Sui, who sometimes found herself in trouble at home for speaking up. “Maybe I just fit here.”
--Toni Baker