Chinese-American Scientist Jane Wu took her own life on July 10 after her research lab was closed, and some speculate that U.S. pressure on Chinese scientists may have influenced her choice.
Dr. Wu was a neuroscientist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She was in charge of studies that examined how RNA used proteins to splice itself. The research her team performed has contributed to scientific understanding of neurodegenerative diseases such as Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, and some forms of dementia.
She killed herself in July at her Chicago home at age 60.
Much of Wu’s work was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which some say has targeted Chinese and Chinese-Americanscientists who are suspected of having undisclosed ties or who are too close to the communist country. The NIH found that more than 250 scientists, the majority being East Asian, had not disclosed funding from China or overlap in their American and Chinese research. Many lost their jobs, and while it is not known whether Wu was a focus of the NIH inquiry, some sources have told media that she was under close observation.
Some of Wu’s colleagues have said that her career was destroyed by the inquiry, according to Dr. Xiao-Fan Wang, a cancer researcher at Duke University.
Jane Wu was born in 1963 in China’s Anhui Province and got her medical degree at Shanghai Medical University in 1986. She went on to study the biology of cancer at Stanford, then did postdoctoral research at Harvard. Wu then worked at Washington University before joining Northwestern in 2005.
Wu’s participation in China’s “Thousand Talents” program may have made her a target of U.S. oversight. The program aims to lure Americans of Chinese descent who were born in the states, among others, to return to China for a time, or in some cases, permanently.
Wu is now buried at Chicago’s Rosehill Cemetery, and Northwestern University has scrubbed her biography and publication record from its website.
