[1] He was the Honorary Research Fellow of Bioversity International and Professor Emeritus at the Department of Crop Science at the Universiti Putra Malaysia.

[3] Chin was brought up in an urban agriculture setting on Jalan Ampang in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

His family reared chickens and they had five to six different species of fruit trees, flowering plants and vegetables.

[4] In 1955, after completing his secondary school education, Chin told his mother that he wanted to further his studies in agricultural sciences at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

[citation needed] In 1961, he started work as a lecturer at the College of Agriculture Serdang, known today as Universiti Putra Malaysia.