Shi Huang was born in Dalian, in the north of China. His mother was a doctor assigned to a military base there, but his father, also a doctor, had been assigned to another base in Beijing. Because this was during the Cultural Revolution, Huang's parents were assigned from time to time to other locations, to "serve the peasants." Huang was sent during those times to his grandparents' house in Wuhan, once when he was about six for a year or so; and his younger brother was sent to relatives in Shanghai. This practice was common at the time in China. When he was seven or eight Huang and his mother moved to Beijing to be with Huang's father. Huang's mother found a job in a hospital nearby, and Huang's father was a microbiologist on the military base. Life in the compound, according to Huang, contained most things people needed, so except for school he seldom ventured outside the walls. In school he did well, being attracted to painting, mathematics, and ping pong. He remembers school as being a school mostly for peasants, so not difficult; he had to learn a lot of political tracts, how to march, and how to work in the fields. He finished his school in Beijing and then went to Shanghai for college. He would have preferred the art academy, but he failed its entrance exam and decided to study genetic engineering instead. The Chinese recognized that at time the United States was superior in science, and many university students wanted to attend American or European graduate schools. He did well on his exam for the graduate program and was selected to participate in the CUSBEA (China-US Biochemistry Examination and Application) program. This was a joint program between China and US professors. Huang studied English for a year at the Guangzhou English Language Center, where he also learned something of American culture and prepared to apply to US graduate schools. He joined John W. B. Hershey's laboratory at the University of California at Davis; there he used a gel electrophoresis assay to study RNA protein interactions. He met his wife, Chen Ruo Ping, who had come to the US on the CUSBEA program as well. She works for a start-up pharmaceutical company, and the Huangs have two children. Huang accepted a postdoc in the Wen-Hwa Lee laboratory at University of California at San Diego, where he initiated a project to express the Rb protein in bacteria. From there he was invited to join the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California, where he continues his work on RIZ as a tumor suppressor gene and of course continues the scientist's continual search for funding.