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BEIJING — When he was 17, Zhao Bowen was a bored student who made an audacious decision. In a country where the cult of diplomas knows no boundaries, he quit school and decided not to take the exam that would have allowed him university entry.
“All that fuss just to learn things that you can find in books or on the Internet anyway? I had better things to do,” he explains, with a laugh.
Starting at 15, Bowen spent his free time hanging out with a team of scientists who were sequencing the genome of the cucumber. “Genetics. Now that's a fascinating thing,” Bowen says.
The previous summer, he had completed an internship with geneticists from the Beijing Genomics Institute, the largest biotechnology institute in the world. They didn’t have any use for diplomas either. As soon as they spotted an exceptionally gifted young person, they offered him what no university could: a job in an extremely well-equipped lab working on an advanced research topic.
Now 21, a bespectacled Bowen looks no different than other young Chinese men of his...
“All that fuss just to learn things that you can find in books or on the Internet anyway? I had better things to do,” he explains, with a laugh.
Starting at 15, Bowen spent his free time hanging out with a team of scientists who were sequencing the genome of the cucumber. “Genetics. Now that's a fascinating thing,” Bowen says.
The previous summer, he had completed an internship with geneticists from the Beijing Genomics Institute, the largest biotechnology institute in the world. They didn’t have any use for diplomas either. As soon as they spotted an exceptionally gifted young person, they offered him what no university could: a job in an extremely well-equipped lab working on an advanced research topic.
Now 21, a bespectacled Bowen looks no different than other young Chinese men of his...