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Years of pouring money into its laboratories, wooing scientists home from overseas and urging researchers to publish and patent is starting to give China a competitive edge in biotechnology, a strategic field it sees as ripe for "indigenous innovation."
The vast resources China can throw at research and development - overall funding more than quadrupled to $191 billion in 2005-13 and the Thousand Talents Program has repatriated scientists - allow China to jump quickly on promising new technologies, often first developed elsewhere.
These efforts were illustrated vividly in April - not without controversy - when scientists at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou published results of a ground-breaking experiment to alter the DNA of human embryos using new CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology.
CRISPR, which allows scientists to edit virtually any gene they target, is akin to a biological word-processing program that finds and replaces genetic defects.
The Guangzhou team is not alone. Data compiled by Thomson Innovation, a Thomson Reuters unit, shows China is a growing force in gene editing, with a burgeoning patent portfolio.
More than 50 Chinese...