The Vietnamese refugee who emerged from a leaky boat to become a Nobel Prize candidate

Professor San Thang is one of Australia’s most respected chemists and once a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. But, it was a split-second decision made while he was inside a Malaysian refugee camp 40 years ago which changed his life forever.

In 1979, a 25-year-old San Thang spent four days and three nights aboard a cramped fishing boat with hundreds of other asylum seekers after fleeing persecution in Vietnam.

On the third night, Thai pirates rammed the wooden vessel and boarded with guns, and began demanding valuables from the passengers.

After a treacherous night bailing the water that was gathering below deck where the hull had been damaged by the pirates, the boat finally reached a small island in Malaysia.

The 409 passengers were then transferred to a refugee camp on Bidong Island. Four decades on, Professor Thang tells SBS Mandarin that it was the “best decision he ever made” to come to Australia – a decision he had to make within seconds.

As he had been voluntarily assisting with the works of interpreting and registering other refugees during his five-month stay at the camp, he recalls that an immigration officer from Australia asked him: “San, you have ten seconds to tell me if you want to come to Australia.”

Without further thinking, Prof Thang immediately seized on the opportunity and arrived in Brisbane on October 17, 1979.

Prof Thang, whose parents immigrated from China during the 1930s, was brought up in Vietnam, where he spent his youth adapting to life inside a country torn apart by war and ideological division. Feeling the malice of a society which frowned upon his community following the Vietnam War, he lost hope for a future in his home country and decided to flee.

He boarded the 19 x 3.5m boat, after paying for his spot with a 250-gram gold nugget that his brother had given him for the journey.

It didn’t take him long to realise that he’d made the right decision to move to Australia, who had abandoned the White Australia Policy six years earlier and opened its arms to refugees.

Following a short stint as a labour worker, he was able to continue to chase his dream of becoming a scientist – following on from his completion of a Bachelor of Science at Saigon University in 1976.

In 1980, Prof Thang was hired as the research assistant to the Vice Chancellor of Griffith University, which presented him the opportunity to complete his Honours degree in chemistry and a PhD in organic chemistry.

In 1986, he joined the CSIRO, the federal government’s scientific agency.

He tells SBS Mandarin that it feels as if “there’s someone who has been leading me, arranging for my life in the background.”

In 2014, research by Thomson Reuters for their citation laureate prize named Prof Thang, who was 60 years old at the time, as one of a trio of scientists from the CSIRO, including Ezio Rizzardo and Graeme Moad, as likely to be contenders for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The three scientists co-developed the reversible addition−fragmentation chain-transfer polymerization (RAFT) process.

The research in RAFT technology was considered the most advanced in the field.

However, one month after the announcement, he was notified that his employment at the CSIRO was to be terminated, as part of mass job cuts at the organization.