On November 14, Beijing time, the 27th Academician Conference of the World Academy of Sciences was held in Kigali, capital of Rwanda. President of Rwanda attended the conference and delivered a speech. Over 400 scientists and representatives of international organizations from nearly 100 countries and regions around the world were present. Bai Chunli, an academician, current Chairman of the World Academy of Sciences and President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, attended the conference. Awards were presented at the conference to scientists from third world countries who have made outstanding contributions. Professor Ge Rili from Qinghai University won the world's only preclinical medicine science award.
The selecting committee believed that Professor Ge Rili has long been committed to high altitude medicine research by revealing for the first time possible reasons why people living on the plateau can survive at high altitudes and figuring out the mechanism for genetic adaptation on the Tibetan plateau as the leader of a team by dint of the most advanced research methods in the world. The problem had confused the international circles of high altitude medicine for over half a century like the “Goldbach conjecture” in the medical field. He and team members not only revealed the possible mechanism for altitude sickness and provided a theoretical basis for hypoxia-related diseases, but also made important contributions to the exploration into genetic resources of human (announced by Science, the most authoritative journal in the world). The project to crack the human genetic code, the Manhattan Project, and the Apollo Moon-landing Project are collectively referred to as the three most important projects in natural sciences in the 20th century. Ge Rili and his team effectively deciphered and drew the world’s first complete genome sequence map of Mongolians on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau ("Tianjiao No. 1"), which shows their ethnic history and inheritance. Accordingly, important findings were made (there has been about 2% of changes in the genome of Mongolians on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and over 300 genetic changes have never been found in other populations; Mongolians and Tibetans on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau share several genes that are different from those in low-altitude populations). It is a milestone for research on people’s adaptation to high-altitude and low-oxygen environments (announced by PLOS Genetics, the most authoritative journal across the world in this field). Since the establishment of the high altitude medicine discipline, the international community has been arguing about the criteria for disease diagnosis for more than half a century, which hindered the related studies on a global scale. With the efforts of the team led by Ge Rili, Qinghai Diagnostic Standard for Chronic High Altitude Sickness (“Qinghai Standard”), the first of its kind in the world, has been developed, so as to remove the scoring related problems in this field (released at the 6th World Congress on High Altitude Medicine). The results of the research headed by Ge Rili have laid the cornerstone for the sustainable development of high altitude medicine the world over.
The World Academy of Sciences is an autonomous international scientific organization initiated in 1983 by the Nobel Prize winner in physics and Pakistani physicist Professor Abdus Salam. It has more than 1,000 academicians from over 70 countries and regions who have made outstanding contributions to the scientific development of third world countries with knowledge in their respective fields including mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, earth science, biology, agriculture, medicine, engineering science and social economics.
Editorial Office for Journal: Chen Peng
