China´s great leap forward in science
(The Guardian China)

Chinese investment is paying off with serious advances in biotech, computing and space. Are they edging ahead of the west?I first met Xiaogang Peng in the summer of 1992 at Jilin University in Changchun, in the remote north-east of China, where he was a postgraduate student in the department of chemistry. He told me that his dream was to get a place at a top American lab. Now, Xiaogang was evidently smart and hard-working - but so, as far as I could see, were most Chinese science students. I wished him well, but couldn´t help thinking he´d set himself a massive challenge.Fast forward four years to when, as an editor at Nature, I publish a paper on nanotechnology from world-leading chemists at the University of California at Berkeley. Among them was Xiaogang. That 1996 paper now appears in a 10-volume compendium of the all-time best of Nature papers being published in translation in China.There is always a certain fraction of talented, innovative people. China has the advantage of having lots of people Related: China´s moon mission to boldly go a step further Continue reading...