Christopher Cullen, deputy director of the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, said China has made huge and vigorous research efforts on the subject.

"As the Chinese idiom goes, we should use history as a mirror. To know what something is today we have to learn about what it was like yesterday," Cullen told China Daily on the sidelines of the 10th International Conference on the History of Science in East Asia, which started in Shanghai yesterday.

The three-day conference brought together around 150 participants, most of whom attended from outside China, to discuss issues relating to science and technology in East and Southeast Asia.

Major topics include the role of science in cultural exchanges between the West and the East; a review and appraisal of the cultural function of science; the function of the history of science in education; and the relationship between the history of science and mass media.

China re-energized its research of the history of science in 1978 when the Chinese Academy of Sciences founded the Institute for the History of Natural Science.

The institue has led China's research ever since, according to Liu Dun, director of the Institute. Three science history departments were subsequently launched at the University of Science and Technology of China in Anhui Province of East China, Inner Mongolia Normal University in North China and Shanghai's Jiaotong University, which is hosting this year's conference.

But Cullen also pointed out that China is still seen by many historians of science in the West as peripheral to their main concerns.

To change this scientists should exploit the rich and frequently unique resources offered by Chinese materials for the application of more recent methodologies in the history of science.

The support of government and leading scientists is enabling Chinese scholars to catch up.

(China Daily August 21, 2002)