Scientific co-operation comes out of the dark

By SIMON COLLINS science reporter

Mushrooms that were once left to grow wild are pointing the way towards scientific co-operation that could transform the economies of both the biggest country in the world, China, and one of the smallest, New Zealand.

A joint research programme at Auckland's Mt Albert Research Centre between Chinese mushroom scientist Yihuai Gao and New Zealand's Crop & Food Research and Massey University is turning the humble mushroom into a source of high-value health supplements.

Gao's company, Alpha Healthcare, is extracting health-giving ingredients from mushrooms and other plants both in New Zealand and China, and exporting natural medicines round the world.

Other New Zealand crown research institutes and biotech businesses are beginning to follow suit.

The result could help not just to shift New Zealand's production out of commodities and into high-value extracts, but also to shift the far larger economy of China in the same direction.

In the rich Zhejiang district of Hangzhou Province on China's east coast just south of Shanghai, where HortResearch chief scientist Dr Ian Ferguson is a visiting professor, farmers are already changing from traditional rice production to high-value crops, planning to import rice from the poorer western provinces instead.

"So they have land available to establish new crops and are very interested in some of our kiwifruit," Ferguson says.

There are risks involved. But in the words of a former HortResearch general manager now running his own biotech company, Dr Garth Smith: "It's going to happen anyway, so we may as well be part of it."

Like everything else in China, the scale of its scientific and technological development is mind-blowing.

After visiting the Zhongguancun Science Park on the outskirts of Beijing this month, New Zealand Science Minister Pete Hodgson remarked: "There's no shortage of money for science in China.

"They have 39 universities in that part of the city and have added to that 47 incubators and 16 sub-parks," he said.

"We went to one of them, a software park which is still being built. They have just built two dozen three-storey buildings.

"There are architectural statements all over the place and a number of international companies, such as Siemens and Oracle, are locating there.

"So China is asserting that its place is much more upmarket than commodity manufacturing."

Chinese Science and Technology Minister Xu Guanhua told Hodgson that China had "special scientific relationships" with four countries to date: Australia, Britain, the Netherlands and Israel.

"Israel is there for water efficiency reasons. China is starting to dry out and Israeli water-harvesting technologies are pretty good, apart from its high-tech sector, which, of course, is quite impressive," Hodgson said.

"Xu was quite adamant that China wished to explore with New Zealand the possibility of New Zealand becoming the fifth such nation."

Science and technology co-operation is earmarked for emphasis in the current talks about a China-NZ free trade agreement, and Hodgson invited Xu to visit New Zealand in the next few months.

"He wants to bring a science and technology delegation with him."

Hodgson's own visit, with 12 New Zealand science managers plus Masterton-born Nobel Prize winner Alan MacDiarmid, who has an institute named after him in China, was aimed at exploring the potential for co-operation.

Officials said a next "logical step" would be to appoint a New Zealand-based co-ordinator for science linkages with China - probably a Chinese-born scientist working in the local science system, on the model of part-time co-ordinators appointed recently for links with Germany and Japan.

There is already a significant base to build on, dating back at least to the 1980s when HortResearch started working with Chinese scientists to develop new kiwifruit varieties.

Since 1990, the institute has also been working with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science in the southwest province of Yunnan to develop a red pear combining Chinese and European flavours.

In 1999, HortResearch Te Puke scientists Russell Lowe and Canhong Cheng and the Sichuan Provincial Natural Resources Research Institute began collecting all wild kiwifruit species that were about to be inundated by the controversial Three Gorges dams on the Yangtze River.

Professor Huang Hongwen, acting director of the Wuhan Institute of Botany, which holds China's biggest collection of kiwifruit species, was made an honorary fellow of HortResearch on a visit to Mt Albert in 2000.

In return, Ian Ferguson has been a visiting professor at Zhejiang University for the past six years, lecturing in horticulture and post-harvest technology and supervising Chinese doctoral students at both Zhejiang and Mt Albert.

"They are interested in developing a lot of their fruit crops, such as peaches, citrus, loquats and bayberry," he said.

"They are starting to build up germplasm and breeding programmes. The university has quite an input into molecular genomics and rice, and is involved in big sequencing programmes internationally."

When Ferguson first went there, his lectures were translated into Chinese by an interpreter. That has changed in just six years - all his students now speak English.

"Now the young kids coming through are on the web. They are internationally literate. There has been a remarkable increase in access to international journals," he said.

HortResearch has just appointed New Zealand-born Chinese Dr Michael Lay-Yee as its first general manager international with a brief to find worldwide markets for New Zealand's horticultural expertise.

But the institute is phasing out work that Garth Smith began on analysing traditional Chinese medicines.

Smith and two American partners have now established their own company, BioVittoria, which has just formed a joint-venture with a Chinese company in Guilin City in Guangxi Province, northwest of Hong Kong, to extract a natural sweetener from a wild fruit called luohan.

The venture has set up a base in the smallest of China's 53 science parks or high-tech zones, and has organised sales worth at least US$6 million ($9 million) to US food manufacturers such as yoghurt companies in the next year.

Smith believes it shows the value of long-term relationships. His Chinese joint-venture partner, Lan Fusheng, came to New Zealand 20 years ago to work with Hastings scientist Don McKenzie, but shortly afterwards McKenzie died a car accident, leaving Lan stranded.

"I took him under my wing for six months. He came and worked with me at Ruakura," Smith said.

From there Lan went to Palmerston North and then back to China.

Smith followed up with a visit to Guilin in 1985, and has just returned from his 22nd trip to China.

The joint venture that he and Lan have formed will be licensed to import as well as export, and Smith plans to offer his experience to other New Zealand companies trying to enter the Chinese market.

He has already sounded out the Chinese on an agritech product from a company associated with the Waikato Innovation Park, where he is based.

"My suggestion is: concentrate on one area [region] and develop it well. Don't try to do the whole base because you won't do it well," he said.

"Once you're in there, you have contacts. Being in that high-tech zone in Guilin means that potentially we have access to all the other parks in China. If they don't have the capacity within their park, they can point you in the direction of where that kind of work can be done."

Crop & Food Research chief executive Paul Tocker said his institute had opted to develop partnerships with Chinese researchers, rather than opening its own office in China.

Its initial venture with Gao at Mt Albert started with a mushroom called lingzhi, which originally brought Gao to New Zealand to work with mushroom experts at Landcare Research in 1992.

Last year, Gao said his company had developed 10 mushroom farms in China and planned factories to extract valuable ingredients from the plants in Auckland and at another Chinese science park at Nantong, near Shanghai.

Since then, Crop & Food has renovated a laboratory at Mt Albert for Gao and his six scientists, working alongside an expanded Crop & Food team of five experts on health products for the gut and two on health extracts from seafood.

Crop & Food, the Seafood Industry Council and the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology are now negotiating a research consortium that will put $2 million into added-value products from seafood in the next year, rising to $4 million or $5 million a year within five years.

"That will allow us to take on, I think, seven new staff in the seafood area," Tocker said.

Hodgson said China wanted collaborations with New Zealand in agricultural, medical and environmental biotechnology, nanotechnology and greenhouse gas emissions reduction.

Landcare Research sustainable business manager Richard Gordon joined Hodgson's mission after the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology agreed to pay $60 for each mission member - the estimated value of their carbon emissions during the trip at $15 per tonne of carbon dioxide - into a fund for New Zealand landowners who let their land revert to bush.

Landcare scientist Ian Turney said that, with Russia now expected to sign the Kyoto climate treaty in December, China might be interested in buying the technology Landcare used to create the carbon fund.

Jacob de Feijter, of the Institute of Environmental and Scientific Research, said his institute had been talking to China's Public Security Bureau about customising ESR software that runs the national database of DNA from criminal suspects.

Hodgson has asked the 12 science managers who went on his mission to report to him soon on the best ways to develop research collaborations with China.

Whatever happens then, the relationship clearly seems destined to deepen.

BUILDING BRIDGES

Auckland University is going for the top in its research relationships with China.

Auckland, listed as New Zealand's top university in this year's performance-based research fund rankings, has established relationships with China's top four universities: Peking and Tsinghua (both in Beijing), Fudan (Shanghai) and Zhejiang (just south of Shanghai).

More than half of the 5400 international students at Auckland already come from China, and the university's Pro Vice-Chancellor (International), Professor Chris Tremewan, said the university aimed to lift more of those students to postgraduate research degree level.

Tremewan is in China this week for the fourth time this year on a systematic programme of linking Auckland and Chinese researchers in science, medicine, engineering, mathematics and social sciences.

In return, Auckland has hosted "an enormous number" of researchers from the top universities, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and several provinces.

Peking University president Xu Zhihong spent three days in Auckland in June before flying to Chile with Tremewan to attend a conference of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities.

His vice-president, Professor Ke Yang, will lead eight top medical professors from the university to a medical science congress in New Zealand in November.

"They are here to scope our research capabilities," Tremewan said. "They have decided to put us on the map. That's good."

HIGH-TECH CHINA

China's spending on research and development has more than doubled as a share of its national income in the past eight years, reaching 1.29 per cent in 2002.

In absolute dollars China now spends more on research and development than any other country except the US and Japan.

An extra US$600 million ($920 million) will be spent on research in the following areas by 2005: medicines, intensive processing of farm produce, dairy products, food security, water-conservation farming, water pollution control, technical standards, super-scale integrated circuits and software, information security, e-administration and e-finance, functional gene chips and biochips, electric cars and magnetic levitation trains.


The Ministry of Research, Science and Technology

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