The world biotech community gathered this week to find solutions to the problems like resources shortage, environmental deterioration, and social imbalances in the port city of Northeast China’s Liaoning province.

“The community should contribute to global sustainability in tackling such problems as the world economy is developing fast,” said Yang Shengli, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chairman of the local organizing committee of the 13th International Biotechnology Symposium (IBS), which raised its curtain Monday in the city.

With a theme of ‘Biotechnology for the Sustainability of Human Society’, the five-day event attracted nearly 3,000 scientists, students, and business representatives from more than 80 countries and regions. Nobel Prize-winners K. Barry Sharpless and Werner Arber are invited to make keynote lectures at the symposium. Some Fortune 500 enterprises like British Petroleum, DuPont, and Monsanto are attending the meeting.

The attendees show great concern about the global problems like resource shortage and environment protection. Nearly one third of all the papers submitted to the organizing committee are related to industrial biotechnology.

Besides keynote lectures, other 220 presentations cover areas like basic research of biotechnology, industrial development and government policies.

Being recognized as the premier international conference in biotechnology, IBS was launched in 1960 in Rome, Italy. The past 12 symposiums were held every four years on a different continent.

The quadrennial event will be held every two years due to the increasing importance and the fast development of biotechnology, said Francesco Nicotra, chairman of the Subcommittee on Biotechnology of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the organizer of IBS.

“Biotechnology is growing very fast. The community has discussed and decided to have a meeting every two years in order to share the new results,” Nicotra told China Daily.

“We need to put our scientists together with a higher frequency than before,” he said.

“Within a couple of years, I hope, most of China’s younger students will receive money support from the Chinese institutions to go to the international conferences,” he said.

Next conference is scheduled to be held in 2010 in Rimini, Italy.

BP sponsored an award for this year’s IBS in order to encourage young scientists and students who are engaged in biotechnology.

A biotech exhibition is held together with the symposium. About 100 researching institutes and companies showcase their results and products at the exhibition.

(China Daily October 15, 2008)