[转贴]Why China needs an NIH

Nature 428, 679 (15 April 2004); doi:10.1038/427679b


Why China needs an NIH

Chinese biomedical scientists are right to push for a research agency that will distribute grants on the basis of peer review.


The emerging strength and influence of Chinese biologists, working at home and abroad, is not yet adequately reflected in the structure of research institutions in China itself. Last April, Zhu Chen, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who has been tipped to become China's next science minister, highlighted the issue and proposed the creation of a new research agency akin to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Chen's proposal was quickly backed in a petition by 22 prominent researchers, most but not all of them Chinese, who implored the Chinese government to take it up (see Nature 425, 333; 2003). But the idea is currently bogged down in disagreements over whether it should embrace an intramural component — a set of government laboratories engaged in health research — or confine itself to distributing extramural grants.

In the United States, the NIH has distinguished itself over the decades by combining these two functions. The National Science Foundation, the main US non-biomedical science agency, has, in contrast, successfully confined its activities to the support of extramural work in the universities. There is an argument that the NIH's intramural labs have made a significant scientific impact in their own right, as well as helping its component institutes to stay abreast of their respective areas of interest.

China already has many laboratories, however, including those run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, that receive support more-or-less directly from the government. Its most pressing need is for a better extramural grant system, to fund research proposals to university scientists on a competitive basis. There is a lot to be said for involving specialists outside China — including the growing cadre of excellent, Chinese-born scientists working in the United States and Europe — in the review component of such a system.

Xiao-Fan Wang, a Chinese-born cancer researcher at Duke University in North Carolina, outlined these ideas at a symposium on 30 March on biomedical alliances between China and California, co-sponsored by Nature and the University of California, San Diego. Chen would have made the presentation himself, but he was denied entry to the United States after he was unable to get a visa.

The current system for funding the life sciences in China is plagued with inefficiencies and shortcomings. Some of these were highlighted by the country's slow response to the emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002, which encouraged Chen to propose a new biomedical research agency in the first place. The proposal has rapidly gained the support of researchers inside and outside China whose participation in peer review would make it work. If properly implemented, with minimal bureaucracy, full transparency and review of grant proposals by independent scientists, such an agency could greatly accelerate the development of biomedical research in China.

前一阵，我看报纸好象说也要建立医学科学研究院

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