The Scientific Instrument Industry Steps Out of the Laboratory to Serve the General Public
During the "12th Five-Year Plan" period, China's scientific instrument industry will increasingly focus on and serve the people's livelihood. Scientific instruments, which were previously "hidden in deep seclusion and unknown to the public," will leave the laboratory and enter hospitals, supermarkets, and markets. They will conduct safety inspections on the environment, agricultural products, food, and pharmaceuticals, ensuring the safety of people's lives and health. This will become a significant direction for the development of the scientific instrument industry.
This information was obtained by reporters at the recently held Academic Conference on Scientific Instruments Serving People's Livelihood in Beijing.
The Academic Conference on Scientific Instruments Serving People's Livelihood, organized by the Chinese Society of Instrument and Control, invited several academicians to introduce the important role modern scientific instrument technology plays in food, pharmaceuticals, environment, safety, disease diagnosis, and its broad future development prospects.
In many people's impressions, scientific instruments are used by researchers in laboratories for scientific research—precious, mysterious, and somewhat delicate. As a result, they are generally unaffordable and difficult for ordinary people to use well. For years, the application areas and market demands for scientific instruments have been very small. Since the 21st century, with the modernization of global science, economy, people's livelihood, society, and military, various scientific instruments have broken out of the traditional scope of scientific experiments to rapidly develop in new directions such as online applications, on-site applications, and automatic detection applications. Combined with computer software and hardware systems, these instruments leverage their unique advantages to form more precise, accurate, rapid, remote-sensing-capable, and pollution-free modern measurement and control technologies, marking a transformation in the scientific instrument industry.
It is reported that in recent years, China has done a lot of research and development work on new types of scientific instruments for people's livelihood. Many achievements have been made in terms of research, production, and application. For example, the portable multi-channel UV/visible spectrophotometer developed by Beijing Puxi General Instrument Co., Ltd. in collaboration with Tianjin University can be packed together with necessary analytical accessories into a small briefcase, making it easy to carry to the field for analysis and testing. This instrument has been widely applied in environmental water quality, environmental protection, and ecological monitoring in the wild and on-site. The handheld intelligent energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometer developed and produced by Kunshan Tianray Instrument Co., Ltd. can quickly and accurately detect various harmful heavy metals.
In addition, there are other instruments related to people's livelihood needs, such as Hangzhou Polytec Technology Company's water quality heavy metal online analyzer, Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics' atmospheric particulate matter analyzer, the Military Medical Science Academy's food safety rapid detection box, the China Academy of Inspection and Quarantine's melamine rapid test instrument, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' fully automatic mini biochemical analyzer, and Biochip BGI's gene chip analysis system. All these are self-innovation achievements obtained by China's scientific instrument industry under the strong support of the national "11th Five-Year Plan" science and technology attack plan.
Although China's instrument industry has achieved considerable development, it still lags behind advanced countries. A relevant official from the Ministry of Science and Technology revealed at this conference that to enhance China's independent innovation capability and self-equipment level of scientific instruments, support scientific innovation, and serve economic and social development, the central government has established a special fund for the development of major scientific instruments. This fund focuses on supporting the development of major scientific instruments based on new principles, methods, and technologies; engineering development based on existing major scientific instruments (facilities) innovative results; development of important general-purpose scientific instruments; key component development of scientific instruments; and the development and application of other scientific instruments in critical core fields of the national economy and national security that are currently constrained by others.
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