Zhai was born in Liyang County (now Liyang), Jiangsu, on 18 August 1930.[2] His mother died when he was 8, and he was raised by his paternal grandmother.[3] He secondary studied at Jiangsu Provincial Liyang High School (江苏省立溧阳中学).[3] In 1950, he was admitted to Tsinghua University, where he majored in biology.[2][3] A year later, he was sent to study at the University of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg State University) on government scholarships.[2][3]
Zhai returned to China in 1956 and that same year became a professor at the Department of Biology, Peking University.[2][3] In 1959, he pursued advanced studies at the Institute of Biophysics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.[3] He returned to China in 1961 and continued to teach at Peking University.[3] In 1969, during the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to the May Seventh Cadre Schools to do farm work in the suburb of Nanchang, Jiangxi, and returned to Peking University in 1973.[3] He was a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1985 to 1986, studying nuclear skeleton and its relationship with gene expression under the supervision of S. Penman.[3]
Zhai died in Beijing on 10 February 2023, at the age of 92.[2][1]
