The importance of curiosity-driven science

If Chinese scientists and researchers want to be more innovative, as the government is now calling for, they need to be more critical, a Nobel laureate in Chemistry remarked yesterday at a conference in Zhongguancun, in Beijing.

"The critical attitude is more widely spread in the Western world than in China," said Hartmut Michel, from Germany, at the annual Conference of Zhongguancun Forum 2011.

To be critical, according to Michel, one has to check everything very carefully and not just believe what one sees in books and other publications, or what one is told by other people and scientists.