Team:Jilin China/HP/2

Situation & Views


Human Practices

  • With the development of basic research, China has become the world’s largest producer of scientific research articles. However, the number of successful technology transformation is limited. Facing transformation difficulties, basic researches are sometimes far away from applications or benefits. In addition, in current situation in China, the investment in basic researches can not meet the requirements of the researches. How does science contribute to technology? How does it promote production? Our project this year, in foundational advance track, is facing similar difficulties. The scientific capabilities are not just shown on the paper or the laboratorial data, instead, it should be geared to the needs of society, especially, for basic researches. In order to guide our project and give us reliable solutions to the current scientific transformation, we made a survey research based on the data gathered from the yearbook of science and technology of China.

  • Data from Yearbook:

    China’s spending on research and development has steadily increased. Corresponding, the investment in basic research shows a similar trend. However, there is no significant correlation, however, between the share of basic research invest and year.

  • Questionnaire of Public Views:

    Introduction

    Based on the data from the Yearbook, we set a series of questions for the public, hoping to know the public attitude towards transformation, including their concerning interested fields and matters.

    Method

    613 participants took part in our survey online in August 2018, among whom around half working in basic scientific research field (students and professors). 57 questionnaires were invalid due to the answering duration, and 592 questionnaires were collected.

    Results

    Ages & Positions

    As it is shown in the chart, more than half of the participants are working or studying in colleges. And nearly 20 percent are working in medical, engineering and education fields.

    Attitudes towards Investment

    Basic research investment is also a problem today. Most people participating in our research are not satisfied with investment from both government and companies. Actually, compared with government investment, support from companies are much more limited.

    Which fields do you think have the best potential to transformation?

    Because the potential application fields of our toolkit are quite wide we would like to find out an output as our first step due to public choices. It is obvious that a large number of participants take their eyes on medical transformation, which provides a specific direction for further HP activities. It surprising that compared with manufacture and engineering fields, public are more concerned with environment issue.

    Which problem do you concern most in transformation?

    In public views, the most difficult problem in transformation is still science and technology itself, which means stable finical support is required and scientific researches need to be enhanced. Besides, other factors also matter: Cost, Safety, Laws, Ethic Issue and etc. We would like to learn more about these problems and solutions in further exploration.

    Conclusions:

    Based on the data from questionnaire and Yearbook, we learned that people are not satisfied with the investment to basic research, and medical research is more important in their opinion.