China 'to overtake US on science' in two years

[DelhiDareDevil]

Well at least India is around there competing with European nations.

 

[Speeder 2]

last time I checked your 35 dollar laptop was a Chinese Hivision speed pad, which is a Chinese brand and is being sold in China for 99 dollars. You govt bought them in bulk, subsidized them and claimed to have made the world's cheapest laptop.

A good post!

“Indian” and “auto” just don’t match each other actually.

As we are at it, a German magazine I read said that so called "Tata Nano" is basically a German auto indeed, because 6 largest subcontractors of Nano are based in Germany, with Bosch AG leading the pack.

What Tata does is only translate German manual into Hindi , and assembly them in India using dirt cheap Indian labour and Indian steel, in order to claim that Tata makes it.

 

[webber]

Well at least India is around there competing with European nations.

citation of science papers doesn't count it's a joke in china colleges

U.S and EU are still pioneers, but we keep up in all fields, two kinds of system

 

[gubbi]

Times Higher Education - Average citation rates by field 1998-2008

What a joke! You can pump up citation ratings by publishing more in biology, clinical medicine and biochemistry, while a country can be great in materials science, engineering and physics and still be dragged down. The citation ratings disproportionately reward pre-2000, biochemistry papers, while severely suppressing post 2000 materials science, physics and math papers.

The US pumps out more worthless garbage in medicine, biology, biochemistry, psychology and neurology than anyone. Engineering and materials science on the other hand? Haha.

Do you understand what citations mean? Or why are some papers/scientific publications cited more often than others? And what exactly has citations got to do with either Biology/Medicine or "Materials Science"? Many papers dont get cited not because their numbers are low, but because they are crappy or substandard or dont contribute anything more to the field than is already known. You sure would understand what I mean when I say crappy article or non-contributing.

Like I said, none of the Chinese came out to refute the misguided post that you made. It just shows how collective mentality and co-operative education stifles creative thinking and independent thought. Or are you guys afraid of criticizing?

Had an Indian or a Pakistani made such a comment, there would be hoards of our compatriots coming out and refuting such misconceptions. However, no Chinese ever do that. What does that tell you?

You guys just proved my point!

 

[webber]

^^ 20 bucks say this is the origin of "Chinese boys"

quite hot in taiwan and southern provinces

 

[Speeder 2]

Well at least India is around there competing with European nations.

Bullcrap!

Don't give me some moronic linear projections of 10 years or more, using which Indian's population would reach 50 billion in probably 80 years.

India's currecnt scinetific output is a head and a shoulder below Spain's, both with similar growth rates.

What's the population of Spain? 50 milllion or so ?

Spain is about the same level as Italy!


Let alone compared with Netherlands, with our population about the same as the slum population within Mumbai, we produce about 4X India's total sicentific output and patents.

The similar picture with smaller Switzerland!


Then think about even smaller European countries such as Belgium, Norway, Austria, Sweden , Denmark , Finland, etc., each one of them is an intellectual /scientific giant compared with India.

Austria, for example, with population of not much more than India's criket teams, produced about half a dozen more Patents than India did in 2010.


.

 

[Speeder 2]

The idea of China overtaking U.S. in science in two years time is sheer nonsense. China is a 6 trillion dollar economy spending less than 1.5% of GDP on R&D and the U.S. is a 15 trillion dollar economy spending close to 3% of GDP on R&D, that is, the U.S is outspending China 5:1. It will take more than a decade for China to catch up.

Don't get me wrong, China is making incredible progress in becoming a scientific power and if you consider we started with almost nothing after the Cultural Revolution, the revival of scientific research in China is nothing short of a miracle.

Largely agreed.

Yet it's on paper, on quantity, not quality which would take at least 20 years IMO.

 

[below_freezing]

Do you understand what citations mean? Or why are some papers/scientific publications cited more often than others? And what exactly has citations got to do with either Biology/Medicine or "Materials Science"? Many papers dont get cited not because their numbers are low, but because they are crappy or substandard or dont contribute anything more to the field than is already known. You sure would understand what I mean when I say crappy article or non-contributing.

Like I said, none of the Chinese came out to refute the misguided post that you made. It just shows how collective mentality and co-operative education stifles creative thinking and independent thought. Or are you guys afraid of criticizing?

Had an Indian or a Pakistani made such a comment, there would be hoards of our compatriots coming out and refuting such misconceptions. However, no Chinese ever do that. What does that tell you?

You guys just proved my point!

One field's "citation" and another field's "citation" are not the same thing. Statistics show that papers on biological sciences get more citations. Does that mean biology papers are worth more than materials papers?

 

[gubbi]

One field's "citation" and another field's "citation" are not the same thing. Statistics show that papers on biological sciences get more citations. Does that mean biology papers are worth more than materials papers?

Citations mean the same thing over all research fields. That means your work is commendable that fellow peers find it important enough to reference it in their work. If your paper is NOT cited, that really means its worth less.

As for biology/medicine, the field is really vast as compared to materials science. So many papers are cited or referred to in this field, than maybe in other fields. There are many highly specialized areas in medicine where very few people work in. So their papers are less cited than others' working on something else. Does that mean their work is worthless? Similarly less number of citations doesnt mean that other fields are worthless. It just means that there are fewer people working in that area of research. But NOT being cited does mean that the work is crappy or worthless.

 

[Chinese-Dragon]

Like I said, none of the Chinese came out to refute the misguided post that you made. It just shows how collective mentality and co-operative education stifles creative thinking and independent thought. Or are you guys afraid of criticizing?

Had an Indian or a Pakistani made such a comment, there would be hoards of our compatriots coming out and refuting such misconceptions. However, no Chinese ever do that. What does that tell you?

You guys just proved my point!

You're right, I'll move to the "paradise" of India right now!!!

Even though Hong Kong has a 30 times higher GDP per capita than India, 2nd highest life expectancy in the world, etc.

But India has "Independent thought"!!!

 

[CardSharp]

Our scientists and engineers are also making 1/3 if not less than the money that their US counterparts make. The cost of research is lower especially considering that instrumentation is a fixed cost while labor goes up, and many can share an instrument but you need actual researchers to do work.

In addition, instrumentation and expendable reagents is CRUCIAL in biological subjects, but it is less of a factor in engineering. This excludes developing countries from much biological research, while it is easier to catch up in engineering. 1 year of monoclonal antibodies (that may produce nothing of value) plus the associated fluorescence microscope costs the same as an AFM. The AFM can characterize a new alloy or ceramic that revolutionizes your country's industry. The 1 year of monoclonal antibodies can maybe start work on a new drug.

Some research like that I'm interested in (chemical processing of semiconductor thin layers) needs 2 things: AFM, and a PVD chamber. All bought for less than 800000 RMB. Reagents another 10000. You can't even get started with 800000 RMB in a biological lab.

I think the Chinese government is serious about becoming a power in research, and it is gone about it in the typical systematic way, setting up things that could help a wide variety of fields like building supercomputers (protein folding, weather, other complex modelling) and building the world biggest genome research centre (no need to tell you guys how important that is to the field of biology)

It can almost be seen as infrastructure for upcoming advanced research.

 

[CardSharp]

Here is an article on the new Chinese next generation genome sequence center in HK.

an earlier post I mentioned BGI (formerly Beijing Genomics Institute, now located in Shenzhen). Below are some excerpts from a Nature article about the Institute, which is funded by a $1.5 billion dollar (!) loan from the China Development Bank.

Some of the researchers at BGI are very young -- the article profiles two who are in their early 20s and already have significant responsibility. Is this really so strange? After all, people who lead teams at startups or at Google or FaceBook, developing key infrastructure, are often not much older.

Nature even ran an editorial about this: Do scientists really need a PhD? Bioinformatics is a good field to try this in as it is computing intensive (even youngsters can produce good code) and a relatively new field (the background genetics and statistics can be taught fairly quickly to smart kids). On the opposite end of the spectrum: particle or string theory, in which even supersmart kids will barely have their footing after 3-5 years of post-BA work. The contrast between fields in which people can quickly get started in research, versus those that have a steep learning curve and lots of accumulated depth, makes for constant misunderstandings and debates over how graduate education should be structured.

Below are pictures of BGI's director and two of the young researchers.

Nature: In 2006, Li Yingrui left Peking University for the BGI, China's premier genome-sequencing institute. Now, freckled and fresh-faced at 23 years old, he baulks at the way a senior BGI colleague characterized his college career — saying Li was wasting time playing video games and sleeping during class. "I didn't sleep in lectures," Li says. "I just didn't go."

He runs a team of 130 bioinformaticians, most no older than himself. His love of games has served him well when deciphering the flood of data spilling out of the BGI's sequencers every day. But "science is more satisfying" than video games, he says. "There's more passion."

The people at the BGI — which stopped officially using the name Beijing Genomics Institute in 2007 after moving its headquarters to Shenzhen — brim with passion, and an ambition so naked that it unsettles some. In the past few years the institute has leapt to the forefront of genome sequencing with a bevy of papers in top-tier journals. Some recent achievements include the genomes of the cucumber1, the giant panda2, the first complete sequence of an ancient human3 and, in this issue of Nature4, the genomes of more than 1,000 species of gut bacteria, compiled from 577 billion base pairs of sequence data.

The mission, BGI staff say with an almost rehearsed uniformity, is to prove that genomics matters to ordinary people. "The whole institute feels this huge responsibility," says Wang Jun, executive director of the BGI and a professor at the University of Copenhagen. The strategy is to sequence — well, pretty much anything that the BGI or its expanding list of collaborators wants to sequence (see 'Mass production'). It has launched projects to tackle 10,000 microbial genomes and those of 1,000 plants and animals as part of an effort to create a genomic tree of life covering the major evolutionary branches. Important species, such as rice, will be sequenced 100 times over, and for humans there seems no limit to the number the institute would like sequenced.

To fulfil that mission, the BGI is transforming itself into a genomics factory, producing cheap, high-quality sequence with an army of young bioinformaticians and a growing arsenal of expensive equipment. In January, the BGI announced the purchase of 128 of the world's newest, fastest sequencers, the HiSeq 2000 from Illumina, each of which can produce 25 billion base pairs of sequence in a day. When all are running at full tilt, the BGI could theoretically sequence more than 10,000 human genomes in a year. This puts it on track to surpass the entire sequencing output of the United States, says David Wheeler, director of the Molecular Biology Computational Resource at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. "It is clear there is a new map of the genomics world," he says.

The charge that the BGI has reduced science to brute mechanization does little to ruffle feathers in Shenzhen. Wang himself quips that the BGI brings little intellectual capital into projects: "We are the muscle, we have no brain." But such comments belie a quiet confidence, in everyone from the BGI's seasoned management to its youngest recruits, that they can make an impact not just to the balance of sequencing power but also in biology, medicine and agriculture. This will be a challenge given the significant loans taken out to expand capacity. Torn between scientific and financial goals, even its founder can't seem to decide whether the BGI is a business or a non-profit research institute. Genome scientists around the world are watching to see how it will strike a balance.

... With this breathing room, the BGI has grown to employ 1,500 people nationwide, more than two-thirds of them in Shenzhen, and this is expected to jump to 3,500 by the end of the year. With the investment in new sequencers, provided by a 10-billion-renminbi loan from the China Development Bank, the BGI's capacity will grow, but so will costs.

... The BGI's Luo Ruibang, also a student at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, turned 21 while at his last scientific meeting. He says he's had trouble convincing other scientists that, lacking doctoral training, he can do top-notch science. "A lot of the foreigners wonder if I'm really capable," he says. Luo and Li were co-first authors on a paper9 describing the discovery of large DNA segments in the Asian and African genomes that are absent in the Caucasian genome.

Li and his bosses are confident that this youth brigade can piece together and verify sequences. "It is a new field," says Wang. "There is not much experience anyway." But interpreting data and designing experiments are two different things, and BGI staff admit a dearth of knowledge in the latter. "We don't know much about biology," Li says. Liu says the BGI needs to overcome its biological blindspot, but he is supportive of its mission. "They are primarily sequencers, but smart ones with big guns," he says.

... Research alone is not going to pay back the 10-billion renminbi bank loan. The BGI makes some income from collaborations, which account for 40% of the sequencing workload. Outsourced sequencing services for universities, breeding companies or pharmaceutical companies bring in higher margins and account for another 55% of the workload (the final 5% is the BGI's own projects). In 2009, the BGI pulled in 300 million renminbi in revenue. That is not enough, says BGI marketing director Hongsheng Liang. In 2010, Liang hopes to pull in 1.2 billion renminbi.

New income could come from proprietary rights to agricultural applications. The BGI, which owns more than 200 patents, has been attempting to do genomics-based breeding with foxtail millet in Hebei and has other agricultural projects in Laos. More cash could come from expansion of services overseas. Within three years, the institute plans to open offices in Copenhagen and San Francisco. The BGI may also charge for access to its Yanhuang database, a project launched in 2008 to sequence the genomes of 100 Chinese; BGI scientists say they would like to expand this number into the thousands. Although according to Yang, it would be charging "at cost" — to cover computational expenses and maintenance, not for the data. ...

 

[ChineseTiger1986]

Guys, stop bringing Vietnam into this because of Gambit's ethnicity.

 

[below_freezing]

Citations mean the same thing over all research fields. That means your work is commendable that fellow peers find it important enough to reference it in their work. If your paper is NOT cited, that really means its worth less.

As for biology/medicine, the field is really vast as compared to materials science. So many papers are cited or referred to in this field, than maybe in other fields. There are many highly specialized areas in medicine where very few people work in. So their papers are less cited than others' working on something else. Does that mean their work is worthless? Similarly less number of citations doesnt mean that other fields are worthless. It just means that there are fewer people working in that area of research. But NOT being cited does mean that the work is crappy or worthless.

I'm not here to argue about the value of biology vs. materials science. I'm here to say that the cost of doing biology, the dependence of biology research on previous biology research (as opposed to first principles calculations or simple physical concepts) and the average number of citations in the west due to the previous 2 factors are all higher than in materials science.

Here is an article on the new Chinese next generation genome sequence center in HK.

I think some fields, you can work in with only a BS. These are more applied. Highly theoretical fields and highly fundamental fields need a PhD. A BS in materials science can make realistic contributions to plastics processing or metallurgy. A BS in mechanical engineering can make realistic contributions to machine building. A BS in theoretical physics can be a stock market analyst at best, never a physicist.

 

[gambit]

Guys, stop bringing Vietnam into this because of Gambit's ethnicity.

I disagree. You should not deny your innate Chinese 'superiority' and the expression thereof.