The National Science and Technology Awards Ceremony is held in Beijing on January 8 (XINHUA)

For ages, male musk deer had been trapped and killed for their glandular secretion to be used in aroma and traditional Chinese medicine. As a medicine, musk is believed to be able to relieve pain and swelling, facilitate blood circulation and revive one's spirit.

Fortunately, the endangered animal has been spared as a result of a synthetic compound substituting the musk, which can produce the same results while sparing the life of the animals.

On January 8, the research and commercialization of synthetic musk, a national project first launched about 40 years ago in China, was granted the first prize of the 2015 National Science and Technology Progress Award at the annual awards ceremony held in Beijing.

At the ceremony, 295 research outcomes were recognized, including 42 winning the National Natural Science Award, 66 receiving the National Technological Invention Award, and 187 accepting the National Science and Technology Progress Award. The Top National Science and Technology Award remained vacant, while the International Cooperation Award in Science and Technology was conferred to seven foreign scientists.

Many of these breakthroughs have already yielded huge economic and social benefits, which is also a factor in their selection. However, historically, effective verification procedures were absent in past screenings, and exaggerations of the economic benefit of some candidate projects had been reported. Candidate projects for the 2015 National Technological Invention Award and National Science and Technology Progress Award were therefore required to report their direct economic benefit including scope of technology application. Third-party accounting firms were entrusted to verify the value for the first time in the awards' history, according to the National Office for Science and Technology Awards (NOSTA), which administers the recognition process.

Real value

"The extended use of synthetic musk has spared at least 9 million male musk deer," said Yu Shishan, Deputy Director of the Institute of Materia Medica (IMM) under Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, who participated in the award winning research project.

"Because of the traditional practice of killing these deer for musk pods, only 50,000 male musk deer are left in China, so the animal is now endangered. A single male musk deer can only produce 10 grams of musk, and even if all of them were killed, only 0.5 ton of the secretion can be produced," Yu Dequan, an academician with the IMM recently told Xinhua News Agency. He said that currently, the annual demand for musk exceeds 15 tons in China.

In 1975, China launched the project to derive synthetic musk. The project was coordinated by the IMM and joined by the Shandong Jinan Traditional Chinese Medicine Factory and Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

In Europe, muscone was synthesized in 1903 to replace musk used as aroma. But muscone is only one ingredient in musk, to replace musk used in traditional Chinese medicine, many other ingredients needed to be synthesized, too, Yu explained.

Chinese research teams conducted many chemical and animal experiments in order to identify key effective components, and the substitute they produced was approved as a new medicine in China in 1993. After being put on the market in 1994, synthesized musk has been used in 760 enterprises all over the country, Yu said. Among the 433 types of traditional Chinese medicine that contains musk, 431 or more than 99 percent of the total use synthesized musk instead of natural musk.

"Natural musk is priced at around 500,000 yuan ($76,923) per kg, whose quality also varies, while artificial musk costs less than 60,000 yuan ($9,231) per kg. It is estimated that the substitute can lower medicine prices by 30-50 percent," Yu said.

He said that so far, an aggregated total of more than 90 tons of synthesized musk have been sold, benefiting more than 100 million patients every year.

Verifying economic benefit is an improvement in the science and technology award system, an unnamed industry expert told Beijing-based Economic Information Daily. Yet he admitted that economic benefits should not be overly emphasized because in some areas, economic benefits cannot measure all the social benefits of science and technology. He said that verifying the social benefit that applicants have reported is to ensure data authenticity, which does not indicate that economic benefits are the paramount evaluation yardstick.

The national science and technology awards were launched in 1995. Contestants are nominated by their employers or previous award winners, academicians or renowned experts in related fields. Finalists go through several rounds of screening by expert panels, and the final results are approved by the State Council.

Over the years, the award evaluation methods have been reformed to make the selection process fairer. According to NOSTA, a number of measures have been adopted to reduce external interference, such as online blind evaluations, random selection of judges, and better matches between candidate projects and the expertise of review panelists.

On November 2, 2015, in order to mark the organization's 30th birthday, NOSTA invited some experienced award reviewers and recipients to a seminar. Participants reviewed the history of national science and technology awards and offered suggestions.

"Overall, I feel that the science and technology award system has been continually improving. Science and technology awards are fair, just and transparent," said Chen Hesheng, an academician with the High Energy Institute of Chinese Academy of Science.

Corporate research

In addition to research outcomes born in universities or state-owned research institutes that have been put into market, several of this year's award-winning research outcomes were produced by corporations. For instance, the machine translation project of Baidu Inc., China's top search engine, won the second prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award.

Wang Haifeng, the project's manager, told Xinhua News Agency that the project was launched in 2010, and put into operation one year later. Now Baidu's translation application can translate between 27 languages; with about 500 million users worldwide, and responds to approximately 100 million translation requests daily.

He said that no more than 10 engineers work on the project, though they do not understand most of the languages that the APP can translate. "We only need to mine bilingual data online, and then the machine will automatically learn from the data, and create a model for automatic translation. Our translation system can also constantly improve the ability of translation by studying feedback from users," Wang explained.

In recent years, the projects winning the national science and technology awards are geared toward solving practical social and economic problems, and really encourage market-oriented innovation, said Hu Gang, CEO of Unicore Communications, Inc., a Beijing-based hi-tech company dedicated to highly integrated circuit design and global navigation satellite system (GNSS) algorithm development. On January 8, the company won the second prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award for developing and industrializing GNSS system and SoC chips.

According to the Administrative Committee of Zhongguancun Haidian Science Park, the two major chips developed under the award-winning project registered a combined sales volume of more than 2.2 million, yielding direct economic benefit exceeding 200 million yuan ($30.8 million).

Copyedited by Mara Lee Durrell 

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