A robotic arm moves samples at the biobank at the Chinese Institute for Brain Research, in Beijing in March.
Photographer: Andrea Verdelli/BloombergChina Races to Build Record Biobank to Rival US Drugs Research
The massive infrastructure push has taken on greater urgency since the US and EU began excluding Chinese scientists from accessing some of its most sensitive data
As a fledgling researcher in US, Zhang Li was struck by the efficiency of extracting human tissue in the morning and mining it for data the same afternoon.
Such a streamlined process had been missing from his years of training as a bio data scientist in China. Inspired, he returned home to Beijing to join the Chinese Institute for Brain Research and launch a national database that will collect blood and DNA samples from 33,000 children to help identify patterns of brain disease and their risk factors.