China plans to build new national laboratories

The Chinese government is planning to build a batch of comprehensive national laboratories, according to Bai Chunli, President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Bai said this at the opening ceremony of the International Seminar on National Laboratory Management on Tuesday. It was attended by thirteen national lab directors from China and seven other countries, including the U.S., Germany, the U.K., Sweden, Italy, Japan and Singapore. They exchanged experiences of building and managing national laboratories.

In his speech, Bai said it is one of Chinese government' s priorities to build national laboratories into a cornucopia of the best talents from home and abroad. In recent years, the Chinese government has made a series of policies about the scientific and technological system reform, so as to implement the innovation-driven development strategy.

According to Ding Hong, one of the speakers and Chief Scientist of Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics of CAS, part of the plan features the building of three scientific facilities and five interdisciplinary research platforms. The three scientific facilities are Synergetic Extreme Condition User Facilities, Beijing Advanced Photon Source and Earth System Simulator, and the five platforms focus on accelerator technology, clean energy, materials genome, environment science and brain science.

"It is very important to build several comprehensive national laboratories." Ding said, "compared to laboratories of a single discipline, comprehensive national laboratories can undertake more large-scale scientific projects and interdisciplinary research projects, for example new energy, materials genome and brain science."

As a national research institute, CAS boasts more than 65,000 researchers and 80 percent of the country' s large-scale scientific facilities, including the world' s biggest radio telescope and Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility. Endit