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January 9, 2018

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Home » Metro » Society

Shanghai enjoys prolific success at awards

By Ke Jiayun | 00:01 UTC+8 January 9, 2018 | Print Edition

SHANGHAI scientific institutes and individuals accounted for more than a fifth of the nation’s top science awards handed out in Beijing yesterday.

The city received 58 national science and technology awards, widely considered the top science prizes in China, for the year 2017. This marked the first time that Shanghai has won over 20 percent of the total number of the prizes at the national science and technology award ceremony. A total of 280 awards were made.

The awards won by Shanghai last year was six more than in 2016. The awards covered natural sciences, technical invention, science and technology progress, and international science and technological cooperation.

Institutes affiliated to the Shanghai branch of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) received seven of the Natural Sciences awards and Technical Invention awards, one first prize and six second prizes.

The first prize was for a rice variety designing project in which three institutes were involved — the Center for Excellence in Molecular Plant Sciences, Shanghai Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, and CAS.

Combining genetics, molecular biology and genomics, the project studied the molecular mechanism of ideal plant architecture for high-yielding rice varieties and worked on breeding rice with the “ideal design” based on their researches. The project was hailed for offering the hope of tackling such problems as starvation.

A Technical Invention second-prize project was led by Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica researcher Yang Yushe for his new medicine Antofloxacin Hydrochloride. This medicine, which has almost no phototoxicity and much less cardiotoxicity than the other similar medicines, helps to treat various diseases related to bacterial infection.

The clinical research found that the cure rate of this medicine reached 98.8 percent and only 1.2 percent of patients showed side effects, much lower than its counterparts. By the end of 2016, the medicine was being used by 150 hospitals and medical institutions in 22 provincial areas.

Hu Lili and her team from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics also won a second prize of Technical Invention, concerning mass production technology of neodymium-administered phosphate glass.

Such glass is used for high-power laser devices.

Hu’s technology will help to increase the yearly average production of large-size, high-performance neodymium-administered laser glass to nearly 10 times current rates. The mass-produced N31 laser glass has already been used in the China Shenguang laser facilities and the Shanghai Superintense-Ultrafast Lasers Facility.

Another three projects conducted by local CAS teams winning the prizes are led by Dong Shaoming, Huang Fuqiang, both from Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, and You Shuli from Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry on space remote sensing facility production technology, solar-power photoelectric material and aromatic compounds.

Fudan University and East China Electric Power Design Institute respectively participated in an infectious disease prevention and treatment project and a super high-voltage direct current project, which are two of the three special prize winners of the National Science and Technology Progress Award.

The Sinopec Shanghai Research Institute of Petrochemical Technology received a first prize in this category with its S-MTO technology of using methanol to produce alkene, an unsaturated hydrocarbon often used in chemical industry. Its yield of alkenes was significantly improved with the new technology.

Polichronis-Thomas Spanos, an American professor, and Yang Shi, a Chinese American Harvard Medical School professor, shared the International Science and Technological Cooperation awards, along with five other expatriates.

Spanos helped to set up Tongji University’s international research center of stochastic mechanics, while Yang helped to found Fudan University’s Institutes of Biomedical Sciences and its epigenetics research center.

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