Many thanks for your comments to my first blog on Nature Network! In this entry I would like to give my response to them.
As Farhat pointed out, it seems to be rather unusual for a medical doctor to become a computational biologist. Most of the computational biology courses when I was younger wanted someone with experience in lab, programming or mathematics, rather than in clinic. So I taught myself scientific programming, data analysis and mathematics. To be honest I am still not so sure if I am a proper compuational biologist.
Timo, thanks for your information on Nature Asia-Pacific Forum. I listened to the podcast which included talks by Noyori and Liu. They discussed several issues but essentially all is about how to do science like West. In my opinion there are a few key elements for this:
1) A common language. It should be a native language within the asia-pacific region. A natural choice would be Chinese.
2) Social stability. Scientists should be able to work without fear of intimidation because of their religion, nationality or political opinion.
3) Autonomy. Governments in Asia-pacific regions have too much control over university and science policy. They should delegate the power to scientist-run organizations.
I wouldn’t expect any of these will materialise in the next few decades but I believe they are absolutely necessary for real science to flourish.
That’s it for today. Have a good weekend.
Kojiro
Hi Kojiro,
I agree that a lot of the discussion at the Nature Asia-Pacific Forum was westward-looking, but there was also a fair amount about what makes the region special, and some successful cases studies (e.g., SARS). As well as the podcast (MP3), be sure to check out the Forum Report (1.9MB PDF)
I’m not sure I can see scientists from across the Asia-Pacific (from India to New Zealand) all conversing in Chinese, but I completely agree with your other points.
Timo, thanks again for your comment. To be honest I also think that Chinese may never become a universal scientific language in Asia-Pacific. However, I still think that the real science superpower (such as USA or early 20th century Germany) write papers in their own language. So if Asia-Pacific is to form the world centre of science around China as many seem to believe, Chinese has to be the language for scientists.