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It is a great honor to be here
at Duke Kunshan University.
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It feels like returning to my alma mater.
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It’s the first time I’ve felt like
I’ve returned to
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my old school since
graduating from Duke.
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I haven’t got a chance
to revisit the Duke campus.
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Today, I’m honored to be here.
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I’d like to share with you
what I’m doing now.
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Today’s theme is “Exploration.”
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I want to tell you that we’re exploring
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on the path of public
welfare 2.0 in China.
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So the title of my speech is
“Why a Duke Ph.D. holder
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would work in public welfare."
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This is a decision that might
seem very odd to many people.
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I hope that after today's speech,
more Duke students
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can join in and do something that
seems like deviating from your proper work.
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In fact, the first half of my
experience is very straightforward,
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a typical experience of a
so-called straight-A student.
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After graduating from high school,
I went to college, to Tsinghua University
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and then successfully got
accepted to Duke.
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At Duke, I spent less
than four years to get my Ph.D.
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Many people might think,
as things went so well,
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I should go into academics,
like Prof. Haiyan Gao,
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to become a good professor in the future.
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But at that time,
for personal reasons,
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I chose to join Novartis Pharmaceuticals,
because my dream has always
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been in developing new cancer drugs.
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I went to Duke to study because
my mother had breast cancer.
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Otherwise,
I would definitely do something else.
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So, my dream has always been the same.
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I later worked in research
and pop science.
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All are actually related
to this experience.
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Many people might wonder why,
in 2018, I wrote an article titled
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“I quit my job on the first day of
Chinese New Year and returned to China
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with my whole family to work
in public welfare.”
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Why did I do it?
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Today, I will share with
you the story behind it.
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First, let me introduce
to you this little girl.
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We’ll call her Little Li
for privacy reasons.
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Little Li is a very cute girl
about 1 year old.
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One day, her parents noticed
she was squinting her eyes.
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They were very worried and took her
to the county hospital for an examination.
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The doctor said she had probably
played too much with a mobile phone.
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It doesn’t matter, he said.
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You should go back and wait three months
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before coming back for
another examination.
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So, they waited.
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Three months later,
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a tumor had already grown in her eyes.
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This time, her parents took
Little Li to the provincial hospital.
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The doctors told them
they had no clue how to treat the girl,
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and suggested they go
to Beijing for treatment.
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So, they went to Beijing.
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Due to the long journey and delay,
the girl developed a serious infection.
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As a result,
she couldn’t receive immediate treatment.
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The infection needed to be treated first.
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It was 22 days later when she finally
received any medicine to treat her cancer.
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The last time I saw Little Li,
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both her eyes had been removed
because of retinoblastoma,
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a very rare but potentially
very malignant tumor of the eyes.
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Her father sent this photo to me
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and urged me to tell everyone
about their experience.
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Her father is in the army.
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After Little Li was born,
her father joined the army.
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When he returned home,
his daughter’s eyes were gone.
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This is the problem that we have to solve.
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There are 40,000 children
like Little Li in China.
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Some 40,000 children
get cancer every year.
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Although the public believe
that cancer is a geriatric disease,
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many children get cancer too.
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The vast majority of children
with cancer are misdiagnosed in China,
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because of information asymmetry
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and because parents have
no awareness of childhood cancers.
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From all of you here,
I believe barely anyone really knows
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what childhood cancer is,
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what types of cancer children get,
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what hospitals they can go to for treatment,
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and what drugs to use.
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Almost none.
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I hope that after my speech today,
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you will have some ideas
about childhood cancer
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and how we are promoting awareness
through public welfare projects.
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For any parents who have just
learned that their child has cancer,
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they must be very scared
and feel very helpless.
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They will have many, many questions,
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such as what the disease is exactly?
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Which hospital is the best?
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Why does my child has cancer?
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And can we have a second child?
closed TED
