China boosts funds for Stem Cells

Source: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/b8befa80-c7f0-11da-a377-0000779e2340.html

By Andrew Yeh in Beijing

The Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government-backed body employing 40,000 researchers, is to boost investment in research into infectious diseases, stem cells, genomics and biotechnology.

The fresh emphasis is a sign of Beijing's anxiety that a disease such as severe acute respiratory syndrome, bird flu or HIV could spread within its borders and derail economic growth.

The academy's investment in research provided mainly by China's government but also in part from companies is forecast to jump 70 per cent in the next five-year period compared with the last period, according to official media.

Government funding for CAS reached 1.3bn ($1.5bn) last year, a threefold increase from eight years ago, said Chen Zhu, the academy's vice-president.

We are trying to improve the competitiveness of our research institutes, said Mr Chen.

We are facing big challenges! All these things [public health problems] were neglected by policymakers for some time.

China's gross domestic product growth has ranged between 9 and 10 per cent in the past three years, with the only significant dip occurring in 2003 during the Sars epidemic, when growth slowed to below 8 per cent in the second quarter of that year.

Senior officials at CAS want to improve their chances of achieving breakthrough research, and plan to facilitate this through closer collaboration with foreign governments and enterprises.

French scientists are already assisting an effort by the Chinese to build a P4 laboratory a facility for handling diseases such as ebola and Sars in the central mainland city of Wuhan.

CAS has set itself a goal of becoming one of the world's top five scientific research organisations by the end of the decade and one of the top three by 2020.