Our government is too busy pumping billions into Freddie and Fannie,
GM, Chrysler, TARP, that they have to scale down NASA (and fire more
people in Red states Texas and Alabama) and devote money to more
political agendas like health care and cap and tax.
David
If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the
newspaper you are misinformed.*--**Mark Twain*
On 7/4/2010 7:15 PM, [email protected] wrote:
China is also unburdened by the myth ( falsehood ) that government is
an impediment
to technological innovation. BR
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
China investing billions to become a superpower in science
By John Pomfret, *Washington Post* | July 4, 2010
SHENZHEN, China — Last year, Zhao Bowen was part of a team that
cracked the genetic code of the cucumber. These days, he is
investigating the genetic basis for human IQ.
Zhao is 17.
Centuries after it led the world in technological prowess — think
gunpowder, irrigation, and the printed word — China has barged back
into the ranks of the great powers in science. With the brashness of a
teenager, China’s scientists and inventors are driving a resurgence in
potentially world-changing research.
Unburdened by social and legal constraints common in the West, China’s
trailblazing scientists are also pushing the limits of ethics as they
create a new — and to many, worrisome — Wild West in the Far East.
A decade ago, no one considered China a scientific competitor. Its
best and brightest agreed and fled China in a massive brain drain to
university research labs at Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. But over the
past five years, Western-educated scientists and gutsy entrepreneurs
have conducted a rearguard action, battling China’s hidebound
bureaucracy to establish research institutes and companies. Those have
lured home scores of Western-trained Chinese researchers dedicated to
transforming the People’s Republic of China into a scientific superpower.
“They have grown so fast and so suddenly that people are still
skeptical,’’ said Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of
California Berkeley who collaborates with Chinese counterparts. “But
we should get used to it. There is competition from China now, and
it’s really quite drastic how things have changed.’’
China has invested billions in improving its scientific standing.
Almost every Chinese ministry has some sort of program to win a
technological edge in everything from missiles to medicine. Beijing’s
minister of science and technology, Wan Gang, will visit the United
States this month and is expected to showcase some of China’s
successes. In May, for example, a supercomputer produced in China was
ranked as the world’s second-fastest machine at an international
conference in Germany. China is now in fourth place, tied with
Germany, with the most supercomputers. China has jumped to second
place — up from 14th in 1995 — behind the United States in the number
of research articles published in scientific and technical journals
worldwide.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
