Human rights movement in China
May 06, 2024 6:40 PM
Dr. Wen Chen of Caltech
Human rights movement in China
Since 2012, Dr. Wen Chen has given​ hundreds of presentations to community organizations about Chinese culture, history, and human rights. In this presntation, she'll tell the story of Chinese authorities arresting millions of citizens for their spiritual beliefs or political views. These prisoners of conscience have been tortured, forced into slave labor, and killed for their organs. While it takes several years in the U.S. to wait for matching organs, most Chinese hospitals promise to find donors within weeks. The Chinese police, legal, and military system collaborated to perform the state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting. Rotarians will also learn about the Chinese Communist Party’s infiltration into the U.S., the human rights movement in China, an innovation that allows people to bypass China's Internet blockade, and the trend of quitting the Chinese Communist Party.
Dr. Chen was born in China at the end of the Great Cultural Revolution. Being victims of the horrific atrocity that killed two million intellectuals and destroyed traditional Chinese culture, Wen's parents had mixed feelings about her education. Despite their discouragement, Wen eventually won a national prize at a science competition when she was 16. She was accepted into a top university for undergraduate study. In 1994, Wen came to the U.S. for graduate school and ​received a doctorate in Biology at the California Institute of Technology in 2000.
Dr. Chen has been working for Caltech since 2000 as a biologist and information scientist on genomics and biological research. Part of her everyday work is to speak at scientific conferences and seminars in universities like U.C. San Diego and Harvard Medical School. She is an active member of the Amnesty International Chapter at Pasadena, a board member for Caltech Women in Biology and Biological Engineering, and a special event host for the Caltech Alumni Association. She lives in Pasadena with her husband and two daughters.