China's Science Revolution

Inside a cavernous, brightly lit shed, row upon row of pigs snuffle and shuffle around in their pens. Pork is big business in China, and this farm in the Guangdong Province in the south of the country has 2,000 pigs.

These animals are bred for their meat - but there’s now a new use for the pig parts that aren’t destined for the dinner table.

Once the pigs are killed, their corneas - the thin, transparent films that cover the front of the eye - are removed from some of them and set aside, to be transplanted into humans.

A few hours’ drive away is China’s oldest, and largest, eye hospital - the Zhongshan Ophthalmic Centre. China accounts for a fifth of the world’s blind people: about eight million of its 1.4-billion population.

As Dr Yuan Jin walks around the busy ward, he tells me that corneal disease is responsible for between 3.5 and five million of these cases.

Injury or infection of the cornea, if untreated, can eventually lead to loss of sight - and for many, the only hope is a transplant. But the waiting list is extremely long.

Once the main source of organs in China was from executed prisoners. But last year, the government stopped this controversial practice, and instead began encouraging people to sign up to donate their corneas after death.

Few, though, are choosing to do so. Yuan explains:

But today he is examining the eyes of patients who have been given pigs’ corneas.

The Chinese government gave the go-ahead for this experimental procedure last year, and about 200 operations have now been carried out.

Fifty-eight-year-old Wu Pinggui is one of the latest recipients.

One of his corneas became infected after an insect flew into his eye. “I didn’t take care of the injury and it got worse,” he tells me. “My eyes became red, swollen and painful.”

Eventually he lost his sight in that eye - and subsequently lost his job as a security guard. Now, 24 hours after surgery, some sight is returning.

I ask him if he was surprised to be offered an animal’s cornea. “I wasn’t too surprised, I trusted the doctor’s decision,” he says.

“It’s very different from the traditional treatment. It’s totally new. So it takes time to introduce to hospitals, patients and society,” he says.

The company says the success rate for the operations is above 90% - about the same rate achieved with human transplants. But some believe that China is moving too quickly, without assessing the risks - or the ethics.

Animal-to-human-transplantation is just one area where China is straying on to controversial ground. Work on stem cells, cloning and gene-editing of embryos is also making waves in the international scientific community.

“I think some people have the view that China is at a frontier in science, and therefore there’s a lot of ambition and appetite to explore the latest technology,” says Charlotte Liu from Springer Nature.

“And therefore, in that context, the time and the effort required to debate, to discuss and fully understand the consequences before embarking on something is probably not entirely there.”

But she says increasing scrutiny from other researchers around the world does seem to be changing this.

“Science is still relatively young in China,” she argues. “And the culture of doing science and ethics needs time to develop and cultivate.”

In the hospital, Wu Pinggui’s check-up has gone well. His eye is still a little red, but the healing process has begun.

He says this will make a big difference to his life - and he hopes that when he’s better, he’ll be able to find a new job.

Perched on an electric buggy, I descend underground. I speed along a tunnel that has been carved into the rock, heading ever deeper beneath a mountain.

“The rock is granite - it’s very hard. There’s 300m (980ft) of it above us, and it shields us from cosmic rays,” explains physicist Prof Cao Jun.

In this subterranean experiment, at Daya Bay in the south of China, scientists are studying some of the oddest particles in the cosmos - neutrinos.

Neutrinos are generated by nuclear reactions - from the fusion in stars, to nuclear power stations here on Earth - and are one of the most abundant particles in the Universe.

Trillions of neutrinos pass through us every second, but we cannot feel them or see them - they have no charge and barely a hint of mass. They’ve been described as being as close to nothing as something can get.

But stranger than all of this is the way neutrinos are constantly changing. As they travel through the Universe, they switch between three different forms - or “flavours”, as scientists put it.

It’s like throwing a banana through the air, and watching it turn into an orange, an apple and then into a banana again. No other particle does this, so far as we know.

But the Daya Bay experiment is one of a handful around the world that may help scientists to understand this weird behaviour. It’s looking at a steady and stable flow of neutrinos generated by a nearby nuclear power station.

Underground, at the end of the tunnel, we reach the heart of the experiment.

He is the dean of deep sea science at Shanghai Ocean University but he has also set up a private company called Rainbow Fish, which built the new research ship and is busy developing submersibles.

One of its unmanned subs reached a depth of 4,000m (13,000ft) in its most recent trial.

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At the moment, we are in the design stage, so we are testing several extremely high-strength materials for it.”

The deepest ocean is a place few people have ever experienced first hand.

The first dive to the Mariana Trench was carried out in 1960 by US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard. Their vessel, the Bathyscaphe Trieste, creaked and groaned as it made the descent, taking nearly five hours.

The only other manned expedition was carried out by Hollywood director James Cameron, who took a solo plunge in a bright green submarine in 2012.

Rainbow Fish wants its sub to be next. But the Chinese government is also exploring the deep. Its manned Jiaolong submarine - designed by Cui before he set up his new company - has made more than 100 dives, reaching an impressive depth of 7,062m (23,169ft).

Now the government is also planning a new vessel that will be able to explore the deepest trenches. It stresses the purpose is purely scientific. But tensions are currently high in the oceans.

China is involved in territorial rows in the South China Sea, and has a growing military presence there. Some fear that marine technology may be used to advance its control of disputed waters.

The Rainbow Fish team insists its venture isn’t about politics and that it is looking to collaborate with American, Russian and European scientists. It is, though, a commercial operation.

The company plans to charge people to use its research ship and submarines, and is targeting three groups, says managing director Dr Wu Xin.

“The first is definitely the scientists who are interested in studying deep-sea science and technology. The second group is offshore companies and oil companies. The last one is tourists and adventurers [who] want to go down themselves to have a look at what’s going on there,” he says.

This kind of entrepreneurial approach may be a new model for science in China. Cui Weicheng says moving away from state-funded research can provide more freedom. Government-funded projects can be bureaucratic and slow, he says.

“I think our government hasn’t found the right method to manage large scientific programmes that enable Chinese researchers to concentrate on their research. They need to think about this when they are thinking about the direction of scientific reform.”

Deep-sea research is a difficult, high-risk activity - and much of the ocean remains unexplored. But Cui, who hopes to be the first Chinese person to reach the Mariana Trench, believes that China could be the nation to truly open up this final frontier.