Biotech's
yin and yang
Dec 12th 2002, From The Economist print edition
China's biotechnology industry is growing fast, but faces several
challenges
In A vast room in one of Beijing's new
industrial parks, legions of white-coated workers mill around machines,
pushing samples through a well-oiled assembly line. One wall is adorned
with a banner reading [base "]The first step of the great long march[per thou]. The
original Long March, in the 1930s, is fabled in Chinese communism. This
time round a more commercial revolution is in the works.
The factory is not turning out television sets or low-cost clothing,
but information: 50m units of genetic sequence a day. It is part of the
Beijing Genomics Institute. The institute's industrial-scale sequencing
operations played a key role in the international Human Genome Project,
making China the only country in the developing world to have joined
in....
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