PMID: 26029635 Free PMC Article

The overall poor English skill of Chinese people probably has a fundamental impact. Even educated Chinese are often disconnected with the outside world, leading to a cultural isolation, so that there is virtually no groundbreaking theories in humanities and arts, as well as in science, came out of China during the last century. The Soviet education system had been targeted as the scapegoat of underachievement in China sine Xinhai Revolution. However, USSR/Russia produced many Nobel Prize winners, Fields Prize winners, and many World Chess champions. While all Nobel Prize winners are certainly very clever, we also admit that some of them were the lucky ones, being at the right time at the right place [(3), p.149] . In areas which demands high level abstract thinking while does not require sophisticated instruments and team collaboration such as mathematics and chess (as measured by Fields Award, Turing Award and Chess championship), in last century China mainland’s performance also paled (13-15). While our neighbor to the west India in her native land produced Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman [1888-1970] with Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930, Amartya Kumar Sen [1933-] with Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998, and Viswanathan Anand [1969-] with World Chess championship in year 2007-2013.

Though I knew Switzerland has good reputation of doing high quality of science and documents published by Swiss scientists tend to rank the top on citation per article (6-8), Switzerland is also the home for pharmaceutical giants like Novartis and Hoffmann-La Roche, it still caught me by surprise with I generated this graph. I congratulate Swiss scientists that they apparently did an excellent job. We also need to take notice that there will likely be a ‘lagging effect’; with the investment associated the performance of Chinese medical scientists will further improve in the future. On the other hand, these data do agree with the common notion that a nation’s scientific performance is not necessarily related to its general population size, such as Miller (9): “good science can only be done by a small minority of each country’s population”; Kanazawa (7): “Science is…inherently elitist”; Murray [(3), p.310]: “Great human accomplishment has not come about just because the world accumulated enough people”.

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我说是官方语言之一，不是唯一的语言。