The annual nobelomania sets in again in Chinese media. However, a nation crazed of an overseas prize is quite unlikely to make any major progress in original research. The most pressing question will be to give natural science workers the necessary breathing space to ponder and think scientific problems whithout being subjected to excessive annual performance assessments.

 

Over-enthusiastic petty bureaucrats obssessed of total power control remains a major obstacle to making good progress in original research. Well matured or crowded fields of research requiring ever increasing budgets, ever more fancier equipments, may generate high impact papers. But in such areas of high competition research it is often only a matter of weeks or months before different laboratories will obtain identical or similar data sets for publication. So what is the whole point of individually-initiated research of personal interests?  

 

It is now high time to make research enterprises an ordinary, one of many ways to make a living for young people to contemplate.  With a normal living to be made, but without such high stakes of large money involved, and monstrous research teams orchestrated, increasing young talents may be attracted into the research enterprise. Within the research universities, it is also important to get rid of those petty bureaucrats with a mindset of power grabbing but lillte interest for excellency in science.