Similarly, the National Engineering Research Centre for Beijing Biochip Technology is headed by Cheng Jing, an engineer and molecular biologist trained in Britain and America.

ECONOMIST: Chinese biotechnology

Five years from now, he suggests, biochip analysis might be used routinely to choose the right treatment for a particular patient, to forecast how effective that treatment will be, and even to estimate the long-term prognosis.

ECONOMIST: An un-killer app

But the next step, according to Dr Meterissian, is to use biochip microarrays that are capable of recognising hundreds of genes.

ECONOMIST: An un-killer app