Chinese Scientists Say SARS Efforts Stymied by Organizational Obstacles

In a China Youth Daily interview, Henry Yang (Yang Huanming) of the Beijing Genomics Institute laments on how Chinese scientists failed to make a more important contribution to SARS research even though SARS appeared in China months before anywhere else. The article is posted on the website of the United Morning News of Singapore. According to the article, Yang has been saying this in public meetings and even directly to Hu Jintao when Hu visited the Beijing Genomics Institute. Henry Yang led the Beijing Genomics in the sequencing of several percent of the human genome as part of the international human genome project.

Reading a little further, we see that this is not simply a matter of some clever Canadian scientists getting the SARS sequencing work done faster than their Chinese counterparts. There is some discussion of how hard it was to get samples, how the big barriers between organizations frustrated them, how they managed to get samples unofficially on April 15 from the Chinese Military Academy of Medical Sciences (and sequenced four of them in 36 hours. Dr. Wang Jian, vice director of the Beijing Genome Institute, said that the biggest lesson they drew from the SARS sequencing effort was how the size of the obstacles between organizations and the lack of cross disciplinary cooperation that frustrated them.

This article makes a deep point about the social, cultural and political barriers constraining Chinese science. Chen Hao, who does science policy research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, says one reason for this is the attitude of waiting for orders and seeking support largely from science plans established by the central government. Although there were important issues that needed scientists to take the initiative in addressing, very few Chinese researchers took the initiative to address them until President Hu Jintao spoke out. Then everything changed. Every research organization has its own researchers and resources which are very much closed to one another. They lack effective means to communicate and cooperate and this failing made sequencing SARS take much longer than it should have.

The article quotes an unidentified scientist who has done research in the USA as saying that China needs government to establish an organizations that can do an effective job of coordination when an emergency arises, just like the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

English Summary Provided By: David Cowhig

Click here for the Chinese version of this article.