Source: Yangcheng Evening News 14/02/2012 A9

Author: Lin Shining

2012 National Science and Technology Awards Assembly Took Place in Beijing Today

From Yangcheng Evening News The 2012 National Science and Technology Awards Assembly was held in Beijing on Feb. 14th. Guangdong Province won 4 Second Prizes in the Natural Science Awards, which symbolized the level of basic research in this field(the First Prizes were not awarded).

The four award-winning projects from Guangdong were: “The Reduction and Accretion of Deep Lithosphere in North China and Adjacent Regions” conducted by Xu Gangyi’s team from Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences; "Research on the Mode and Mechanism of Plant Molecular Phylogeny and Adaptive Evolution” conducted by Shi Suhua’s team from Sun Yat-Sen University; “Research on New Target Spots for Protecting Nerves in Ischemic Stroke” conducted by Gao Tianming’s team from Southern Medical University; “Basic Research on the Growth of Metastable Nanometer Materials” conducted by Yang Guowei’s team from Sun Yat-sen University.

This year, again, nobody won the First Prize of National Science and Technology, the 8th time since 2000. As for the reason, Yang Guowei explained that the First Prizes represented the highest level of basic scientific research in our nation, thus there were extremely strict criteria for examining and verifying them. Besides, governments at all levels still need to make a bigger budget for scientific research. Although it has the largest scale among local natural science foundations, Guangdong Natural Science Foundation is still relatively too small when compared with the investment in applied scientific research.