For scientist Wang Mingwei, who was born in 1956, staying on top of the pharmacological sciences is his dream. He’s already an acknowledged expert in the field.

Wang now serves as the director of the National Center for Drug Screening based in Shanghai’s Pudong New Area, and he is also a professor of pharmacology at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica in the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Wang, whose grandmother and parents were all doctors, worked in factories for three years before sitting for China’s national college entrance exam when it was reinstated in 1977. He went on to obtain a medical degree in 1982 from Shanghai Medical University.

Two years later, he went abroad to further his studies.

“As a physician, I was limited to being able to help only one patient at a time even if I worked very hard,” he says. “By contrast, scientists involved in medical research have the ability to address fundamental questions and develop breakthroughs that can benefit hundreds, if not thousands, of patients.”

Wang attended UCLA School of Medicine and the Institute of Animal Physiology at the University of Cambridge in the UK. He was awarded a PhD in physiology by Cambridge in 1989 and started his research career a year later with several biotechnology companies based in the United States.

Wang says his generation cherishes education because it was the first to be readmitted to universities after the “cultural revolution” (1966-1976).

During his overseas study, he cherished two dreams. “The first was that our kids and grandchildren would be able to attend overseas summer camps and visit other countries to meet their counterparts in the West.”

What he hoped would be realized in his lifetime has become quite commonplace.

The second dream was that China would be able to host scientists and students from developed countries in his lifetime. That, too, has come to pass. Students from the US, Japan and European countries have undertaken studies in his laboratories.

“The dreams were realized because of the rapid development in China,” Wang says.

In the past 30 years, Wang has published more than 140 research papers, and received multiple academic awards and honors from the UK, the US and China. He is an inventor of 61 international patents.

His research achievements include the discovery of the non-peptidic glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist (Boc5) and the determination of the 3-D structure of the human glucagon receptor.

An exciting moment in his life was the serendipitous discovery of a new class of non-peptidic glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists with therapeutic effects on diabetic mice.

It was a very significant scientific breakthrough in the area of diabetes research, which took more than four years of relentless research by Wang’s team.

“We were able to do it in a competition with many first-class labs in the world, and we prevailed in the end,” he says, with obvious pride.

Though Wang holds US citizenship, he eventually decided to return to Shanghai.

In 1994, the Shanghai Municipal Government launched a campaign to try to attract Chinese professional talent to return home. Wang recalls attending a meeting with about 30 overseas scholars, during which Shanghai officials urged them to apply their expertise to helping the motherland advance.

“I felt obliged to do something here at that time,” he says of his decision to return.

Of the 30, three of them remain in Shanghai.

Wang recalls a visit to the Oriental Pearl TV Tower in 1996. “I remember very vividly when I looked down from the tower, Shanghai was completely a construction site,” he says. “I talked to my father and said, “All foreigners are coming, I should definitely come back or I will regret it when I get old’.”

In the mid-1990s, Wang served as a consultant to Merck and to the United Nations Development Program on China-related healthcare projects. He also became heavily involved in entrepreneurial activities, co-founding several biopharmaceutical start-up companies in the US, UK and China. He helped the transfer of high-throughput DNA sequencing technology to China because China wanted to initiate its own human genome studies at that time.

In 2002, he won a Magnolia Silver Award for his contributions to Shanghai.

In 2001, Chen Zhu, China’s former health minister, and Xu Kuangdi, former mayor of Shanghai, recommended him to lead the National Center for Drug Screening. He took up the full directorship in 2003 and also served as assistant president of Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences.

A year later, he was appointed by the Pudong New Area Government as senior advisor on the biopharmaceutical industry and was elected as the first president of Shanghai Pudong Engineers Association.

The World Health Organization Special Program for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases named him as one of the 12 experts on its Thematic Reference Group on Innovation and Technology.

“I have no regrets,” he says. “Many of my classmates are doing extremely well as physicians and surgeons, and they have made a lot more money than me, but I am happy with what I have.”

Wang says he hopes he will be remembered for establishing the Chinese National Compound Library, the largest in Asia now, which will benefit Chinese scientists for many years to come. He even designed the building housing the library, which he calls “an immortal asset.”

He says when he was young, China was very poor, and people of his generation lived very simple lives, eating plain noodles, da bing (大饼), a thin pancake spread with sesame seeds, and you tiao (油条), deep-fried dough sticks.

“We have seen in our childhood and youth what the country looked like — the hardship people endured, the complete isolation, the lack of freedom and personal expression, the inability to choose your own job,” he says.

Now, sitting in a spacious office decorated with paintings and memorabilia collected on trips abroad, Wang looks like a man who has found personal fulfillment in the realization of dreams.

“A lot of people asked me, “You have done everything, why do you want to do this anymore’?” he says. “When you have reached a summit, the next dream is to stay there and help others climb it.”

A dream, he says, needs to be more than wishful thinking.

“When you have a dream, your feet have to be very solidly on the ground,” he explains. “You build your dream by whatever available vehicles, materials and resources you have. If you work hard, you can do it.”