[2] Wang returned to China at the end of World War II despite efforts by Keilin and Joseph Needham to persuade him to stay at Cambridge.

[2] In these capacities, he recruited many prominent Chinese scientists from abroad, including future academicians Cao Tianqin, Chen-Lu Tsou (Zou Chenglu), Wang Debao and Niu Jingyi.

He started the project in 1958 with a team of scientists, who first synthesized the 20 amino acids that constitute proteins, and then used them to produce chains of insulin.

[6] However, the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) intervened and the Chinese Communist government considered the Nobel Prize a symbol of Western decadence.

[1] After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Wang and his team resumed their work and achieved the synthesis from inorganic chemicals of a transfer RNA (tRNA), another significant biological molecule, in the late 1970s.

When he won the award with its prize money of one million yuan, he used it to fund a scholarship for graduate students at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

[2] Academician Xu Genjun eulogized Wang with a quotation from the Tao Te Ching: "The top class of virtue is like water, which benefits ten thousand objects without any demands for return.