He called on CAS researchers to focus on major bottleneck issues in China's socio-economic development and national security, and direct their efforts to original scientific inventions, key technical innovations and major system integrations in those areas that would play a critical and forerunning role in China's long-term development, including matter, energy, resources, information, life, health, ecology, environment, brain and cognition, earth, aerospace, ocean and revolution of military affairs.

The CAS president made the remarks in a recent talk to communicate the gist of the winter session of the Party's Leading-member Group at CAS, which was held from Jan. 7 to 11 in Beijing.

As a national strategic taskforce in science and technology, CAS should constantly reexamine its roles and missions in light of national socio-economic growth. It should conduct the basic research that is orientated to national targets, providing scientific and systematic cognition for China's development. Its high-tech research should deal with strategic innovations concerned with China's international competitiveness and national security, focusing on major system integrations and critical technological breakthroughs.

Its studies on sustainable development should aim at the understandings of objective laws in the fields of resources, ecology, the environment and life, promoting harmonious co-existence between man and nature and providing knowledge, technique and methods to improve public health.

The three categories of research should keep connected, supportive and interacted with each other, playing a unique and superior role in the national innovation system. CAS should implement those research and development tasks that are difficult for universities and impossible for business enterprises to perform, noted Prof. Lu.

Prof. Lu pointed out that the buildup of S&T Clusters tops the CAS agenda in the third phase of "Knowledge Innovation Program" (KIP, 2006-2010). Efforts should be made to push for their healthy development and significant achievements.

Prof. Lu said that research institutes are the primary units for innovation activities at CAS. To advance their continuous reform and development is the basis and key link for achieving the goal of building CAS into an enterprising institution featuring reform, innovation, and coordinated progress.

A trial operation of the overall and supplementary reform was started in 2007 at some representative institutes with a solid basis of comprehensive capacities, good development tendency, outstanding achievements and innovative leadership. In the first batch, seven institutes have been singled out as testing units, namely, the Institute of Computing Technology, Institute of High-energy Physics, Institute of Microbiology, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, and Institute of Physics. The work should be accelerated in 2008.

In line with an evaluation of the performance of its institutes over the past two years, said Prof. Lu, the CAS headquarters will readjust in 2008 their development objectives and philosophy, and related resource distribution for the remaining three years of the third phase of KIP, so as to encourage them to upgrade their targets, optimize their systems and improve their capacity and efficiency.