Chinese Academy of Sciences achieves lots in 7 years

President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Lu Yongxiang said here Sunday that in the seven years since the academy deepened its restructuring, it "has achieved lots of scientific goals which have great bearing on the national security and sustained social development." At a CAS work meeting, Lu said academy researchers completed scientific research for China's first-ever manned space mission, invented and launched a telecommunication satellite, invented a versatile central processing unit chip, made world-leading high-performance computer servers, invented new drugs and led most countries in genome sequencing and analyses of protein structures and functions. From 1998 to 2004, CAS scientists conducted 122 key national projects on basic research, accounting for 36 percent of the country's total, 48 big projects funded by the national natural science foundation, accounting for 52 percent, 365 key projects funded by the foundation, accounting for 32 percent, he said. In 2004, the statistics showed, CAS scientists published a great number of research papers quoted by the Scientific Citation Index, 115 percent more than in 1998 and twice the amount done by the prestigious Max-Planck Society in Germany. In the past year, CAS scientists published 28 research papers in Nature and Science, both internationally prominent scientific journals, also 115 percent more than in 1998. Lu said that in the past seven years, CAS "basically completed" restructuring of its research institutes.