My Chemical Story: The accidental chemist

I like to say I’m an accidental chemist.

It wasn’t possible to control your own destiny when I was in high school 45 years ago. In the China I grew up in, your future was decided by where you were born, by your elders, and by the government.

I didn’t choose to study chemistry. I didn’t even choose where I went to college. But when you are forced into something, you can either complain and give up, or do your best with what you are given and create your own destiny. I chose the latter. It was a long road, but I developed a love for this foundational science, and with hard work and patience found my dream job and a happy life.

I feel lucky. I’m really grateful to all the people who helped me become who I am. At every point, there were people who helped me. You can work hard, but you need support and help from others to succeed.

I was born in Jingjiang, then a county of 400,000 people about 160 km up the Yangtze River from Shanghai. It was 1965. China was on the brink of the Cultural Revolution. Your birthplace determined your future. And everything was controlled by the government.

If you were born in the city, the government guaranteed amenities such as food, housing, and education. But I was born in the countryside. We didn’t have the freedom to move to the city to find a job.

One of the very few ways to qualify for urban household registration, or city hukou, was to go to college. Otherwise, you were destined to become a farmer or laborer in the countryside. If you went to college, the government also guaranteed you a job, since it owned most of the companies at the time.

So of course, college admission was very competitive. In 1982, around 10–15% of high school students had a chance to go to college. And getting into the college and program you wanted was a gamble.

You took an entrance exam, or gaokao, after high school. A week later, you filled out a form with your top three school choices. But we didn’t even know our entrance exam score! Our teachers helped us estimate it. And then we chose schools based on that guess, our interests, and how many students a school was going to admit from our province that year. So our school choice, and hence our future, depended on an educated guess and luck.

I thought studying mechanical engineering would help me work in manufacturing. So my first choice was Xi’an Jiaotong University, a prestigious engineering school.

My second choice was East China Normal University. If you graduated from one of the normal universities, you were guaranteed a teaching job in high schools or universities. I don’t even remember my third school choice. But it doesn’t matter, because my teacher wrote my destiny.

Here’s how it worked. You gave your form to a teacher, who submitted it to the Education Bureau of the county. And my teacher thought I was qualified to go to the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), the top pick for most high school students at the time.

I had good grades and was consistently ranked number one or two in my high school. But I didn’t think I was good enough for USTC. My teacher had confidence in me though. So he changed the top school I had listed on my form and wrote in chemistry for my major. I found out 2 weeks later.

As a student in China, you listen to what your elders tell you. When I was accepted into USTC as a chemistry major, I was happy because it was ranked one of the best then. But I was not sure about studying chemistry.

Once I started learning more at a deeper level though, I found it very interesting and started to like it. And then I realized chemistry is a fundamental discipline. With a chemistry foundation, you can study materials, physics, or engineering. So eventually I realized this was a good path.

After graduating from USTC in 1987, I went to Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where I pursued PhD research on nonlinear optical materials. It was supposed to be a 4-year journey, but it took far longer to earn that PhD than I expected.

I was about to write my thesis when the event at Tiananmen Square happened. Like many other students, I decided to leave China by applying for graduate school in the US.

The process was slow and expensive. I applied to 10 schools and was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the summer of 1991, I arrived at the San Francisco airport with $100 in my pocket. The airport was so modern, and I was shocked by all the cars I saw outside the window while waiting for my flight to Philadelphia.

Penn provided 2 months of English class in the summer before the semester started. I’m extremely grateful for that. Then I spent 2 years synthesizing and characterizing conductive polymers with Professor Alan G. MacDiarmid. But I was his only student, and he was planning to retire. So I had to make a change again.

Professor MacDiarmid recommended me to Professor George Whitesides at Harvard University, and I left Penn with a master’s degree in inorganic chemistry in 1993. Of course, a few years later, Professor MacDarmiad shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and restarted his research group.

I finally got my PhD at Harvard after another 3 years. I learned a lot from Professor Whitesides, including how to write proposals and papers. He was the one who advised me to work on nanomaterials in my independent research career.

Chemistry is a foundation for nanotechnology. If you know the language of molecules and atoms, if you can think in terms of molecular interactions, you can engineer better materials and systems. As you go down to very, very small scales, there are so many challenges that need your expertise in chemistry.

I have used this type of thinking throughout my career. I developed silver nanowires currently used in touchscreens and other commercial products while at the University of Washington. My team at Washington University in St. Louis developed nanofiber-based materials that have been commercialized for wound management. And my current projects at Johns Hopkins University include using nanofiber materials to help repair and regenerate tissues and organs, as well as using a platform we call nanobottles to deliver everything from small-molecule drugs to cosmetics.

I couldn’t have developed all these nanomaterial systems without my chemistry knowledge. When I talked to my high school teacher a few years ago, he joked that I’m successful because he made the right choice for me. And I said that if I hadn’t found success, I wouldn’t have blamed him, because it was my responsibility to make good of the situation.

Now when I talk to students, I always encourage them to study chemistry. If I were to do it all over again, chemistry would be my top choice. But this time it will come from the bottom of my heart. I won’t accidentally walk into it.

Younan Xia is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at Johns Hopkins University, with equally split appointments in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

As told to Prachi Patel. Views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of C&EN or ACS.