China Bets Big on Big Science

Hits:2070   Date: 3/29/2006

For a few lucky research fields, a new government road map for science is like winning the lottery

BEIJING—He Fuchu, a major general in the People’s Liberation Army, is combat ready. “Advanced countries compete fiercely to control the high ground in protein research,” says He, using military jargon to describe his primary objective as director of the Beijing Protein Research Center. Now He, a vice president of the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences, is about to get a substantial war chest to fund his center’s research in proteomics, a big winner in China’s new 15-year plan for science and technology (S&T).

The long-awaited S&T plan, a set of marching orders handed down to scientists last month, may set the tone of science in China for years to come. It specifies 16 major engineering projects, including design of large aircraft, moon exploration, and drug development. Four major basic research programs are highlighted: protein science, topics in quantum physics, nanotechnology, and developmental and reproductive science. Although not stated in the plan, R&D spending by all sources, industry included, will rise from 236 billion yuan ($30 billion) in 2005 to 900 billion yuan ($113 billion) in 2020, Chinese off icials announced last month. Basic research is slated to climb from 6% of R&D expenditure in 2004 to as much as 15% in 15 years.

With government coffers flush, Chinese scientists had hoped the new plan would give a bigger boost for basic research. However, “basic science is still not playing a central role in the government’s mind,” asserts Shing-Tung Yau, a mathematician at Harvard University. As in the past, scientific activity will be yoked tightly to economic development. “New scientific knowledge and inventions need to be industrialized and transformed,” says Lu Yongxiang, president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). A buzzword permeating the document and on the lips of science officials is “innovation”: the key, the plan states, to reducing China’s reliance on imported technology and intellectual property. Industry is expected to shoulder a heavier load than it currently does. For encouragement, the plan offers companies tax incentives to spend more on R&D.

Although the details have not been filled in, the plan has been hailed as a noble attempt to reshape a landscape of patchy scientific talent into a cohesive community churning out innovations, rivaling the West. The plan is “an important platform for China to transform from the largest developing country to a world powerhouse,” says Duan Yibing, a science policy expert at the CAS’s Institute of Policy and Management.

Others are hesitant to jump on the bandwagon. They worry that a heavy emphasis on applied science and megaprojects will stifle creativity. “The most innovative ideas come from ver y few creative scientists at rare moments, whereas planning of large-scale projects requires the consensus of many scientists,” says Yi Rao, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and deputy director for academic affairs of China’s National Institute of Biological Sciences (NIBS). “It is unrealistic to expect very innovative science projects to come out of planning.”

Muffled criticism

Drafting the S&T plan was not straightforward. Twenty working groups involving 2000 scientists and officials wrangled over the document for close to 3 years, revising it a dozen times at a cost of $10 million. The buck stopped with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who chaired a ministerial committee over the working groups. Since becoming China’s prime minister in March 2003, Wen has made a “scientific approach to development” a theme of his administration, backed by steady increases in R&D funding. “I believe that Prime Minister Wen had the best intentions when he decided to increase funding and, at the same time, required scientists and engineers to come up with visionary plans on how to use the funds,” says Rao.

SOURCE: CHINA’S STATE COUNCIL

17 MARCH 2006 VOL 311 SCIENCEwww.sciencemag.org

Published by AAAS

 

NEWSFOCUS

CREDITS (TOP TO BOTTOM): ELIZABETH J. RAO; DENISE APPLEWHITE/PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

It quickly became clear that Wen hoped to replicate the success of China’s first S&T plan, a 1956 blueprint that led to the creation of scores of CAS institutes, produced the nation’s first atom and hydrogen bombs, and sent up its first satellite. Although the government never spelled out “two bombs and one satellite” as a goal, people associate these triumphs with the 1956 document, and Wen was determined to rekindle past glory by embracing large projects.

Deliberations slowed, however, when some scientists openly questioned the new plan’s emphasis on big programs. In the fall of 2004, as the working groups were putting the finishing touches on the plan, Nature published a compilation of essays, some sharply critical of elements of the plan and of the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), the lead agency for crafting and implementing it.

In one essay, three prominent Chinese scien-tists—Rao; Bai Lu, a neuroscientist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health; and CAS biophysicist Chen-Lu Tsou—asserted that MOST’s spending lacks transparency and gives bureaucrats too much power over scientists. The authors recommended stripping MOST of its budgetary authority and bolstering mechanisms for awarding peer-reviewed grants. In a second essay, Mu-ming Poo, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of CAS’s Institute of Neurosciences of the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, blasted waste and poor accountability, which he said are inevitable in big science projects. Chinese media devoured the broadsides.

MOST complained to the General Administration of Press and Publication. The oversight body squelched the debate, banning distribution of Nature’s China supplement and warning Chinese editors not to play into the hands of foreign forces. “What’s most difficult for me to understand was their assertion that we were in cahoots with foreign publications,” says Liu Dun, editor-in-chief of Science and Culture Review, a small journal ordered to scrap plans to publish debates on China’s S&T structural reform. Discussions of the S&T planning process were purged from Chinese media, and several critics were bounced from working groups.

After more than a year’s delay, the S&T plan emerged—with big science front and center.

Supersized

The four basic science programs deemed most strategic are areas in which China has already invested considerable sums. Each megaprogram is expected to receive about $1 billion over the next 15 years, says a researcher close to government planners. “There are surely more chances for innovation” in hot areas such as nanotechnology, says Xie Sishen, chief scientist at the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology (NCNST). The center was created  in late 2003 by merging CAS’s nanoscience center and research groups at Beijing University and Qinghua University. The move, some say, anticipated the high profile awarded by the new S&T plan.

The plan places NCNST and the Beijing Protein Research Center in the driver’s seats of the megaprojects in their respective fields. That disturbs some observers. “I am resolutely against the system of one chief scientist” controlling tens of millions of dollars of research funds, says Yigong Shi, a molecular biologist at Princeton University. In August 2004, Shi and 10 other members of the Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America—a group of Chinese biologists working in the United States—wrote an open letter to Wen expressing concern about the big biology projects in the draft S&T plan. They claimed that such projects would fail to achieve their goals and would strangle competition.

Features of the other two basic science megaprograms may make them more appealing to small teams. Scientists who helped shape the program on developmental and reproductive biology say they intend to establish a merit-based system to distribute funds. The program “probably will stimulate the interaction among genetics, developmental biology, and evolution, which is a very promising direction,” says Zhang Ya-ping, director of CAS’s Kunming Institute of Zoology.

Some critics worry that money will be wasted and that expensive new instruments will languish because there are too few skilled scientists to use them. “The number of basic-science scholars is far from satisfactory,” Yau says, despite government programs to entice talented expatriates and foreigners to work in China.

Others see a strategic flaw: Enshrining narrow priorities in a 15-year plan could make it hard to change course in the future, warns Yau. “It is very bad to commit money [over a long term] to directions that are considered to be important now,”Yau says, noting that the plan ignores “many impor tant areas”—including his own, mathematics. Indeed, some predict an exodus from disciplines not in vogue. “Scientists may shift their research focus to favored areas in the plan. If they don’t, they can hardly get funding,” says Deng Xingwang, an agricultural biotechnologist and director of NIBS. Even the coun-try’s bastion of basic research funding, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, seems to toe the line. Although its budget is slated to increase by $50 million to between $400 million and $500 million this year, sources say, its 2006 handbook stresses “an integration of the national strategic need and the independent development of science.”

Another worry is that big programs may be impervious to adequate oversight. Because almost everybody in a field in China will be involved in a big science project, nobody can objectively evaluate it, as Rao and his colleagues pointed out in their essay. Some have suggested bringing in expats to conduct reviews. “The government should establish a more open mechanism so that overseas Chinese scientists can take part,” says Shi.

Duan says the critics will be proved wrong. “By catering to the national need, basic research will enjoy an opportunity for development by leaps and bounds,” he says. “There is still much room for the free exploration driven by curiosity.” Others see the plan as a multibillion-dollar gamble.

                       –HAO XIN AND GONG YIDONG

Gong Yidong writes for China Features in Beijing.