An Analysis of the Function and Status of CAS in National Nanotechnology Research

摘要

BIG, namely nanoscience & nano-technology, biotechnology & bio-medicine (including genetic engineering), information technology (including computing and communications) and cognitive science (including cognitive neuroscience) are universally regarded as four R&D disciplines to critically influence human life in the near future. Providing technological groundwork for the latter three's healthy development, nanoscience and related technologies now become the most active S&T frontiers in the world today. Since the National Nanotechnology Initiative started by the US government in 2000, a world-wide rush on the research of nanoscience & nanotechnology comes into being. Many developed countries draft national strategic plans for the discipline's sound development, such as Japan's Science and Technology Basic Plan from 2001 to 2005, Australia's National Competitive Grants Programme and the European Strategy for Nanotechnology. Against this backdrop, some developing countries are also vying with others for intensive R&D in this regard. As early as in the mid-1980s, the CAS leader-ship foreseaw the great opportunity subsumed by the emerging discipline of resolving a series of important scientific questions and anticipated the promising prospects of nanoscience in its industrial application. In a bid to introduce the concepts of nano-crystal and nano-materials and the research progress in this field to Chinese scientific community, Prof. H. Gleiter from Germany was invited by CAS to give lectures in September 1986. This was the first of foreign nanoscience experts invited to visit China. Before long, a group of informal seminars and discussions were held by the Academy in search of an optimal point for making the disciplinary breakthrough. On the other hand, several CAS institutes began to initiate a few R&D projects, thus triggering a forward-looking deployment. In addition, the first research paper and the first review devoted to this discipline by CAS scientists were published in August and October in 1988 respectively. if simply viewed from the timing, we may find that the Chinese study of nanoscience was launched almost at the same starting line in comparison with the international community.