This is a tough topic for various reasons. For one, it was the norm to attribute older scientific theories from the east to western philosophers. This is a point of great debate and might piss a lot of people off since it goes against everything they were taught.

Apart from this, many eastern scientist have often received the recognition they deserve in the modern era. I'll list out a few examples of both below:

Older Eastern Science: 1. Foundations for chemistry were laid down by Arabs far before the 16th century. The word alchemy, which then led to words like alchemist, chemistry etc was actually an Arab word called al-kimia. There were alchemists and primitive chemists before that, but I believe the Arabs' version of chemistry most closely resembles the modern theories.

1. Rhinoplasty used to be widely practiced in India and is said to have been the motivation behind/starting point for development of rhinoplasty in Europe.

2. Many mathematical theorems were discovered in India, China and Egypt. The most famous of these is the Pythogaras theorem, which was first discovered by Aryabhatta, an Indian mathematician a few hundred years before Pythogaras.

I'm sure there are many more which I simply do not know about. Also, my history knowledge is limited to the Indian sub-continent, I'm sure there are many more stories like this from China/Japan.

Newer scientists: 1. Okazaki, a Japanese researcher discovered the Okazaki fragments. If I'm not mistaken, many functions of polymerases were also discovered by Japanese scientists. Even today, Japanese scientists make a dispropotionate amount of discoveries and advancements in the field of genetics (including cloning).

1. Satyendra Bose, an Indian physicist, was the first to suggest many quantum theories and is the namesake for Bose-Einstein condensates as well as bosons. His theories about photons were never accepted by Western publishers until he collaborated with Einstein and they published a paper together. It is interesting to note that despite many researchers winning noble prizes for making discoveries based on his theories and for proving his theories correct, he never received the nobel prize.

I'm sure there are many more I'm missing but, these are the few that I know about off the top of my head.

As for the debate, I believe both of you are correct in a certain sense. For a long time, it used to be East vs. West. Recently, it has become a more combined effort, but some racist tendencies do still exist discouraging eastern researchers to publish in the west. Somewhere between Bose's time (1900-1920) and Okazaki's time (post 1950), the world changed and became more accepting of eastern scientists.