6 ms·

China's Science Revolution

75 points by alandarev 10y ago

biofox 10y ago
I find these reports both exciting and deeply reassuring. As research in the west becomes more politicised and regulated (the biosciences especially), having serious Chinese investments in science, with aspirations to become world leaders, is precisely what we need to promote competition and drive progress. Another example is the use of CRISPR gene editing in human embryos. While we are dragging our feet ruminating over the ethical implications (largely ignoring the prospect of curing countless diseases), the Chinese have used the opportunity to get a head start. As China continues to progress, it won't be long until we have another "Sputnik moment". If we won't fund and regulate science rationally, hopefully fear and national pride will motivate us instead.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Well one reason for us dragging our feet is our collective memory of eugenics.
  - biofox 10y ago
    I think a lot of the issues come from conflating positive and negative eugenics. Promoting and enabling people to have healthier progeny is in no way comparable to forcibly removing people from the gene pool through sterilisation or murder. People are going to have children regardless. If there's an option to reduce suffering, I think we have an imperative to follow it.
    - zepto 10y ago
      How do you know that enabling people who happen to have resources in one of the current political regimes to edit their embryos will reduce suffering? It could just as easily increase it.
      - Kalium 10y ago
        Do you know what Tay-Sachs is?
        zepto 10y ago
        How is that relevant?
        Kalium 10y ago
        It's a source of suffering that can be solved through genetic engineering of embryos that some group of people with resources will be inclined to address. It is relevant because it precisely fits your criteria.
        zepto 10y ago
        Sure but my point is that technology that empowers a small group of powerful people to reduce their suffering may end up increasing suffering overall.
        Kalium 10y ago
        Yes. This is possible. You are completely correct. Of course, this is in fact true for all values of $TOOL in "Given $TOOL, a bad thing may happen".
        zepto 10y ago
        Sure - but the risks vary from tool. Rich people editing their babies seems like it's more risky for society than most tools.
        Kalium 10y ago
        It's also a tool that can literally save real, countable lives otherwise factually known to be doomed to horrific suffering and very early death. If I understand it correctly, your objection is that it may be possible for some group of people to use this to increase suffering in an abstract way.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
      If we prevent certain kinds of people from even being born in the first place, how is that not as bad as murder or sterilisation?
      - oldmanjay 10y ago
        can you answer the converse? It's not at all clear to me how excising genetic dead ends is anything even remotely related to murder or sterilization, so I feel like the burden is on you to actually put something forth.
        TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
        You're still erasing people from the gene pool.
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Gene pool is not made of sentient beings. It has no inherent moral value in itself.
        Nadya 10y ago
        Under that argument - choosing not to mate is erasing people from the gene pool. Choosing who you mate with is also erasing people from the gene pool and denying people the possibility of mating with you at all is also erasing people from the gene pool. With the safe assumption that sperm and eggs have variations from one another - masturbating erases thousands if not millions of potential people from the gene pool and every period a female has without fertilization is another person missing from the gene pool. Given the number of people on the planet - resulting in trillions (and trillions) of DNA combinations between mating pairs - millions of possible people are erased from the gene pool on the grounds of "not everyone can mate with everyone in a given lifetime, even if we wanted to". Not to mention all the potential genes that die each day. I'm not sure I see your point.
        semi-extrinsic 10y ago
        When a couple uses gene therapy to ensure their children don't get stuff like mitochondrial myopathy, how is that bad? Do you really think it's better for that couple (and society) that they do it the "natural way" and only have children who won't live to see their eighteenth birthday?
    - internaut 10y ago
      Thank God for the Chinese. They must think we're insane. Bioethicists I've watched debate are seemingly unconcerned with the present day. I've never seen it emphasized (as it used to be once) that the potential for mental and physical handicaps goes up very dramatically as a woman ages. There exists a fairly narrow window to produce children optimally. I am confident no school children are aware of this through sex education. It is sort of brushed under the carpet in favour of 'right to choose'. You would not believe the rate of deformed children that exist. In my small town there are six or seven special centers for children with mental and physical handicaps. I am convinced this is because the parents got to the idea of having children late. This is a failing of society. "http://www.ivfne.com/content/editor/Fertility http://www.ivfne.com/content/editor/Fertility Age Graph.jpg" http://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/1331118/disability_chart_1.0.png http://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/1331118/di... http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/downsyndrome/images/prevalence-chart.jpg http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/downsyndrome/images/p...
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        It may depend heavily on the country. In Poland, which is arguably a western nation, we were taught about the "optimal childbearing age" in biology classes, and the women I know are acutely aware of the concept. Maybe what you're describing is a US thing?
        internaut 10y ago
        Poland, along with the eastern European countries doesn't have this hangup about human biology. I believe what I was saying mostly applies to the US and western European countries. For all their faults, communist countries at least took science education seriously. The idea that a woman and man have a finite amount of time to produce healthy offspring is a 'bad culture fit' for the kind of egalitarian orthodoxy that is not taken seriously in ex-communist countries. If you're in the US or western Europe, try asking random average people what the age limits are before the natural fertility rate is 1% per month (it is age 45). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/19/age-female-fertility-declines_n_4817609.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/19/age-female-fertilit... Ironic that it advises education. Most IVF clinics don't accept eggs after 42 because the probability of an IVF cycle working is less than 5%. Here's a study showing the contradiction between what women/men have the impression of being true, with the facts. http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/5/1375.abstract http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/5/1375.abstract "Even though participants generally perceived themselves as being educated about fertility issues, both men and women vastly overestimated the ages at which female fertility shows a slight and a marked decline. The discrepancy between their perceived knowledge and what is known regarding the science of reproduction is alarming and could lead to involuntary childlessness if men and women's reproductive decisions are based on inaccurate perceptions." I don't find it alarming that people make mistakes. I do find it alarming that this was well known in the past, even when people couldn't read and now university students are less educated than their grandparents. Come to think of it, maybe the canard about education reducing the reproduction rate in developing countries is correct after all...
- melling 10y ago
  Really? I've been waiting for over a decade for China and India to step onto the world stage. We should encourage and help more. These two countries with a combined 2.6 billion people should be able to easily outpace the research in the west. Does it matter if basic research is done in the US, India, or China? Imagine if China and India could each double the amount of research done by the US.
  - Pica_soO 10y ago
    Four bully's instead of two surely make for a nicer school yard.
nedsma 10y ago
While the world is traditionally looking at the West to lead new scientific advancements, they might be wrong. India and especially China are heavily investing into their science projects which are costing less than comparable projects in the US or the EU. India today launched a model of the reusable space shuttle prototype that took 5 years to develop and cost less than $15 million. How is that awesome? On the other hand, the US spends more on the defense R&D than on all other sectors combined (health, energy, space, environment etc). The EU's science projects often suffer from project decentralization, bureaucracy and member countries' varying public approval rating that are affected by political issues: Greek debt, migrant flood, situation in Ukraine, terrorism etc.
- simula67 10y ago
  The problem with India though is that the country's education system was started by the British to recruit low level civil servants. I suspect that type of education system would be biased towards creating low level office workers and not pioneers of science and it continues to this day. The basic principles of science and critical thinking are still not a priority in our education system.
  - pm90 10y ago
    The way you put it, it almost seems like the whole Indian education system has remained the same since the British left. There has been a lot of reform and progress towards making science and mathematics more accessible to the masses.
- dnautics 10y ago
  investment alone does not good science make. (obviously this is a slightly self-serving argument for me, but:) much of the best science has been done on a budget.
arcanus 10y ago
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/03/138937778/plagiarism-plague-hinders-chinas-scientific-ambition http://www.npr.org/2011/08/03/138937778/plagiarism-plague-hi... I don't believe I can put it better than the article above, "These days, China is lavishing money on Mr. Science. But without the checks and balances provided by Mr. Democracy, the corruption plaguing the rest of the system is infecting the reputation of Chinese science. "
- mlvljr 10y ago
  Once they arrive at the proper tech level, the reputation will get fixed by itself (and the corruption, too, probably) :)
- officialjunk 10y ago
  why do you think that "good" science is dependent on having democracy? is there a reference study to support this notion?
  - joe_the_user 10y ago
    I don't think one needs a specific study for such a broad question. Science has historically based on a system of open debate. From Galileo onward, the ability of a scientist to engage in experiments which put commonly believed ideas into question has been one of the foundations of scientific progress. Both the NAZIs and the regime of Joseph Stalin had a history of supporting well-connected frauds to the detriment of science. This doesn't mean that an authoritarian regime make science impossible but a regime where one's connections largely determine one's success, which stifles public debate and where winning become more important than telling the truth is going to have a hard time cultivating the honest, open debate that science needs to arrive at truer theories. China is well known for scientific fraud already. The current leader is attempting to "root out corruption" and the party may try to root out bad science too but given that the anti-corruption efforts have gone against the leader's enemies, it seems likely that bad scientists with good connections can rest easy.
    - petra 10y ago
cossatot 10y ago
I've spent a good amount of my research career working on (and sometimes in) China, with and without Chinese collaborators, depending on the project, and I have reviewed a lot of research by Chinese scientists. It is excellent and remarkable how fast they are improving. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Western scientists (mostly American and French scientists) were brought in quite a bit to help modernize the system, and it has helped substantially. The institutional resources and raw brain power available have meant rapid progress, especially once the Chinese grad students and faculty got up to date on the bleeding edge of research. However, as with economic development, there are some substantial structural changes that need to happen in the transition from 'catch-up' growth to leadership. The biggest is a mind-set thing: There is far more respect for authority and confirmation bias in Chinese research than Western (especially American) research. In so many papers, the researchers go out and get great data and do a bang-up job of analyzing it, and then conclude by saying the results support the old hypotheses of the senior faculty who lead the research institute or some old Western luminary, regardless of the outcome of the analyses. I'm not going to say here that science advances funeral by funeral, but I definitely think that undergrad/grad students who grow up scientifically hearing about the cutting edge theories are more capable than older scientists of integrating the new theory them into their view of the world and their mental database of observations. This is required to further refine, develop or reject the theories and advance the state of knowledge. When junior scientists are not encouraged to rock the boat, then science advances much more slowly. Hopefully as national and institutional self-confidence increases, then revisionism (i.e. telling your boss that he's wrong, or that Dr. Famous American is full of shit) will get stronger. The second is that, at least in my field, it is becoming very hard for Westerners to collaborate with Chinese scientists, and particularly to do fieldwork in China. (Note that I am a geoscientist and have mostly worked in Xizang province in Tibet, which has its own sensitivity issues). But I think that the government is deciding that the Chinese are caught up and then disallowing access to limit international competition. I can definitely see how they could feel exploited in a 'scientific imperialism' sort of way, and this is not at all restricted to China. But while this may lead to a more satisfying distribution of scientific fame for the Chinese, it also limits the rate at which the science advances. And Tibet is one of the richest areas in the world for studying tectonics and earthquakes, because it is vast, very active, and has essentially no vegetation so the quality and quantity of data is very high. Limiting access definitely means slowing down the rate at which we learn to understand earthquakes and earthquake hazards, and while there is a global downside (much of this knowledge applies to earthquakes everywhere), the downside is the highest for the Chinese citizens living near the faults that are not receiving as much study due to fewer researchers.
Jun8 10y ago
I just finished reading volume 1 of The Three Body Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem) and started vol 2. Could the big radio telescope be a case of life imitating art :-) P.S. Fantastic book BTW, quite different from general SF fare.
- dajomu 10y ago
  I had exactly the same thought, thinking of that dish sending out a signal instead...
gumby 10y ago
Thank goodness for these comments. The article structure makes it almost impossible to read. What on earth are they thinking?

75 points by alandarev 10y ago

I find these reports both exciting and deeply reassuring. As research in the west becomes more politicised and regulated (the biosciences especially), having serious Chinese investments in science, with aspirations to become world leaders, is precisely what we need to promote competition and drive progress. Another example is the use of CRISPR gene editing in human embryos. While we are dragging our feet ruminating over the ethical implications (largely ignoring the prospect of curing countless diseases), the Chinese have used the opportunity to get a head start. As China continues to progress, it won't be long until we have another "Sputnik moment". If we won't fund and regulate science rationally, hopefully fear and national pride will motivate us instead.

digi_owl 10y ago
Well one reason for us dragging our feet is our collective memory of eugenics.
- biofox 10y ago
  I think a lot of the issues come from conflating positive and negative eugenics. Promoting and enabling people to have healthier progeny is in no way comparable to forcibly removing people from the gene pool through sterilisation or murder. People are going to have children regardless. If there's an option to reduce suffering, I think we have an imperative to follow it.
  - zepto 10y ago
    How do you know that enabling people who happen to have resources in one of the current political regimes to edit their embryos will reduce suffering? It could just as easily increase it.
    - Kalium 10y ago
      Do you know what Tay-Sachs is?
      - zepto 10y ago
        How is that relevant?
        Kalium 10y ago
        It's a source of suffering that can be solved through genetic engineering of embryos that some group of people with resources will be inclined to address. It is relevant because it precisely fits your criteria.
        zepto 10y ago
        Sure but my point is that technology that empowers a small group of powerful people to reduce their suffering may end up increasing suffering overall.
        Kalium 10y ago
        Yes. This is possible. You are completely correct. Of course, this is in fact true for all values of $TOOL in "Given $TOOL, a bad thing may happen".
        zepto 10y ago
        Sure - but the risks vary from tool. Rich people editing their babies seems like it's more risky for society than most tools.
        Kalium 10y ago
        It's also a tool that can literally save real, countable lives otherwise factually known to be doomed to horrific suffering and very early death. If I understand it correctly, your objection is that it may be possible for some group of people to use this to increase suffering in an abstract way.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
    If we prevent certain kinds of people from even being born in the first place, how is that not as bad as murder or sterilisation?
    - oldmanjay 10y ago
      can you answer the converse? It's not at all clear to me how excising genetic dead ends is anything even remotely related to murder or sterilization, so I feel like the burden is on you to actually put something forth.
      - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
        You're still erasing people from the gene pool.
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Gene pool is not made of sentient beings. It has no inherent moral value in itself.
        Nadya 10y ago
        Under that argument - choosing not to mate is erasing people from the gene pool. Choosing who you mate with is also erasing people from the gene pool and denying people the possibility of mating with you at all is also erasing people from the gene pool. With the safe assumption that sperm and eggs have variations from one another - masturbating erases thousands if not millions of potential people from the gene pool and every period a female has without fertilization is another person missing from the gene pool. Given the number of people on the planet - resulting in trillions (and trillions) of DNA combinations between mating pairs - millions of possible people are erased from the gene pool on the grounds of "not everyone can mate with everyone in a given lifetime, even if we wanted to". Not to mention all the potential genes that die each day. I'm not sure I see your point.
        semi-extrinsic 10y ago
        When a couple uses gene therapy to ensure their children don't get stuff like mitochondrial myopathy, how is that bad? Do you really think it's better for that couple (and society) that they do it the "natural way" and only have children who won't live to see their eighteenth birthday?
  - internaut 10y ago
    Thank God for the Chinese. They must think we're insane. Bioethicists I've watched debate are seemingly unconcerned with the present day. I've never seen it emphasized (as it used to be once) that the potential for mental and physical handicaps goes up very dramatically as a woman ages. There exists a fairly narrow window to produce children optimally. I am confident no school children are aware of this through sex education. It is sort of brushed under the carpet in favour of 'right to choose'. You would not believe the rate of deformed children that exist. In my small town there are six or seven special centers for children with mental and physical handicaps. I am convinced this is because the parents got to the idea of having children late. This is a failing of society. "http://www.ivfne.com/content/editor/Fertility http://www.ivfne.com/content/editor/Fertility Age Graph.jpg" http://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/1331118/disability_chart_1.0.png http://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/1331118/di... http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/downsyndrome/images/prevalence-chart.jpg http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/downsyndrome/images/p...
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      It may depend heavily on the country. In Poland, which is arguably a western nation, we were taught about the "optimal childbearing age" in biology classes, and the women I know are acutely aware of the concept. Maybe what you're describing is a US thing?
      - internaut 10y ago
        Poland, along with the eastern European countries doesn't have this hangup about human biology. I believe what I was saying mostly applies to the US and western European countries. For all their faults, communist countries at least took science education seriously. The idea that a woman and man have a finite amount of time to produce healthy offspring is a 'bad culture fit' for the kind of egalitarian orthodoxy that is not taken seriously in ex-communist countries. If you're in the US or western Europe, try asking random average people what the age limits are before the natural fertility rate is 1% per month (it is age 45). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/19/age-female-fertility-declines_n_4817609.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/19/age-female-fertilit... Ironic that it advises education. Most IVF clinics don't accept eggs after 42 because the probability of an IVF cycle working is less than 5%. Here's a study showing the contradiction between what women/men have the impression of being true, with the facts. http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/5/1375.abstract http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/5/1375.abstract "Even though participants generally perceived themselves as being educated about fertility issues, both men and women vastly overestimated the ages at which female fertility shows a slight and a marked decline. The discrepancy between their perceived knowledge and what is known regarding the science of reproduction is alarming and could lead to involuntary childlessness if men and women's reproductive decisions are based on inaccurate perceptions." I don't find it alarming that people make mistakes. I do find it alarming that this was well known in the past, even when people couldn't read and now university students are less educated than their grandparents. Come to think of it, maybe the canard about education reducing the reproduction rate in developing countries is correct after all...
melling 10y ago
Really? I've been waiting for over a decade for China and India to step onto the world stage. We should encourage and help more. These two countries with a combined 2.6 billion people should be able to easily outpace the research in the west. Does it matter if basic research is done in the US, India, or China? Imagine if China and India could each double the amount of research done by the US.
- Pica_soO 10y ago
  Four bully's instead of two surely make for a nicer school yard.

nedsma 10y ago

While the world is traditionally looking at the West to lead new scientific advancements, they might be wrong. India and especially China are heavily investing into their science projects which are costing less than comparable projects in the US or the EU. India today launched a model of the reusable space shuttle prototype that took 5 years to develop and cost less than $15 million. How is that awesome? On the other hand, the US spends more on the defense R&D than on all other sectors combined (health, energy, space, environment etc). The EU's science projects often suffer from project decentralization, bureaucracy and member countries' varying public approval rating that are affected by political issues: Greek debt, migrant flood, situation in Ukraine, terrorism etc.

simula67 10y ago
The problem with India though is that the country's education system was started by the British to recruit low level civil servants. I suspect that type of education system would be biased towards creating low level office workers and not pioneers of science and it continues to this day. The basic principles of science and critical thinking are still not a priority in our education system.
- pm90 10y ago
  The way you put it, it almost seems like the whole Indian education system has remained the same since the British left. There has been a lot of reform and progress towards making science and mathematics more accessible to the masses.
dnautics 10y ago
investment alone does not good science make. (obviously this is a slightly self-serving argument for me, but:) much of the best science has been done on a budget.

arcanus 10y ago

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/03/138937778/plagiarism-plague-hinders-chinas-scientific-ambition http://www.npr.org/2011/08/03/138937778/plagiarism-plague-hi... I don't believe I can put it better than the article above, "These days, China is lavishing money on Mr. Science. But without the checks and balances provided by Mr. Democracy, the corruption plaguing the rest of the system is infecting the reputation of Chinese science. "

mlvljr 10y ago
Once they arrive at the proper tech level, the reputation will get fixed by itself (and the corruption, too, probably) :)
officialjunk 10y ago
why do you think that "good" science is dependent on having democracy? is there a reference study to support this notion?
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  I don't think one needs a specific study for such a broad question. Science has historically based on a system of open debate. From Galileo onward, the ability of a scientist to engage in experiments which put commonly believed ideas into question has been one of the foundations of scientific progress. Both the NAZIs and the regime of Joseph Stalin had a history of supporting well-connected frauds to the detriment of science. This doesn't mean that an authoritarian regime make science impossible but a regime where one's connections largely determine one's success, which stifles public debate and where winning become more important than telling the truth is going to have a hard time cultivating the honest, open debate that science needs to arrive at truer theories. China is well known for scientific fraud already. The current leader is attempting to "root out corruption" and the party may try to root out bad science too but given that the anti-corruption efforts have gone against the leader's enemies, it seems likely that bad scientists with good connections can rest easy.
  - petra 10y ago

cossatot 10y ago

I've spent a good amount of my research career working on (and sometimes in) China, with and without Chinese collaborators, depending on the project, and I have reviewed a lot of research by Chinese scientists. It is excellent and remarkable how fast they are improving. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Western scientists (mostly American and French scientists) were brought in quite a bit to help modernize the system, and it has helped substantially. The institutional resources and raw brain power available have meant rapid progress, especially once the Chinese grad students and faculty got up to date on the bleeding edge of research. However, as with economic development, there are some substantial structural changes that need to happen in the transition from 'catch-up' growth to leadership. The biggest is a mind-set thing: There is far more respect for authority and confirmation bias in Chinese research than Western (especially American) research. In so many papers, the researchers go out and get great data and do a bang-up job of analyzing it, and then conclude by saying the results support the old hypotheses of the senior faculty who lead the research institute or some old Western luminary, regardless of the outcome of the analyses. I'm not going to say here that science advances funeral by funeral, but I definitely think that undergrad/grad students who grow up scientifically hearing about the cutting edge theories are more capable than older scientists of integrating the new theory them into their view of the world and their mental database of observations. This is required to further refine, develop or reject the theories and advance the state of knowledge. When junior scientists are not encouraged to rock the boat, then science advances much more slowly. Hopefully as national and institutional self-confidence increases, then revisionism (i.e. telling your boss that he's wrong, or that Dr. Famous American is full of shit) will get stronger. The second is that, at least in my field, it is becoming very hard for Westerners to collaborate with Chinese scientists, and particularly to do fieldwork in China. (Note that I am a geoscientist and have mostly worked in Xizang province in Tibet, which has its own sensitivity issues). But I think that the government is deciding that the Chinese are caught up and then disallowing access to limit international competition. I can definitely see how they could feel exploited in a 'scientific imperialism' sort of way, and this is not at all restricted to China. But while this may lead to a more satisfying distribution of scientific fame for the Chinese, it also limits the rate at which the science advances. And Tibet is one of the richest areas in the world for studying tectonics and earthquakes, because it is vast, very active, and has essentially no vegetation so the quality and quantity of data is very high. Limiting access definitely means slowing down the rate at which we learn to understand earthquakes and earthquake hazards, and while there is a global downside (much of this knowledge applies to earthquakes everywhere), the downside is the highest for the Chinese citizens living near the faults that are not receiving as much study due to fewer researchers.

Jun8 10y ago

I just finished reading volume 1 of The Three Body Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem) and started vol 2. Could the big radio telescope be a case of life imitating art :-) P.S. Fantastic book BTW, quite different from general SF fare.

dajomu 10y ago
I had exactly the same thought, thinking of that dish sending out a signal instead...

gumby 10y ago

Thank goodness for these comments. The article structure makes it almost impossible to read. What on earth are they thinking?