What are the most valuable qualities a scientist needs?

"A competitive spirit and honesty," answered Samuel Chao Chung Ting, winner of 1976 Nobel Prize for Physics, on his visit to Beijing last week. The world-renown scientist was the keynote speaker at the opening ceremony of the 2006 Annual Meeting of China Association for Science and Technology.

"Science is the field that only acknowledges No.1 the one who comes second in finding the Relativity will by no means become known," he said.

"And for honesty, science has little to do with places or time. What you find here today will be able to achieved in another place someday. So, it is foolish to cheat."

The 70-year-old Chinese-American physicist made a short trip to the capital and greatly impressed the audience, which included local media, with his direct speech and evidence of his own implementation of the two qualities.

"No one dared to send a magnet to space before. Theoretical physicists said it was difficult, and experimental physicist said it was impossible," said Ting, referring to his latest experiment on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), which aims to search for extraterrestrial anti-matter and dark matter. Like always, the scientist insisted on doing an experiment, which had never been done before.

With the successful operation of AMS in space in 1998, Ting proved to the world he was heading in the right direction. An upgraded AMS will be sent to the International Space Station in 2008, running three to five years, to continue its search. Ting is honest about the potential results. "Who knows what will come out," he said.

He said 90 percent of the matter in the universe was beyond people's eyesight. Some evidence has shown that anti-matter and dark matter do exist, but nobody knows what they look like.

"That's what AMS is going to find out. But I myself cannot tell you whether AMS will make it or not," Ting said. "I do it simply because I am curious about it."

Unbridled curiosity is Ting's motivation on every experiment he has ever worked on. The professor, who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the J particle, never makes any exaggerations about his work. He never comments on subjects he does not know.

"I don't know" were the three words most frequently heard at the press conference he held on Saturday, when answering the "big questions" put forward by some media, such as, "what do you think of the difference in science education between China and the United States?"

"I cannot give you any answer beyond my knowledge," Ting added.

Ting shared five enlightening experiments he has conducted, including measuring the radius of electrons, discoveries of the J particle and gluons, the L3 laboratory and the AMS.

His point was simple. Without the advancement of basic research, applied technologies would never be developed.

"There are always an interval of 20 to 40 years between discovery of a basic theory to its application for industrialization," he said.

"So we need to consider science development from a broad and long-term point of view.

"And that was exactly what I was told by former Chairman Deng Xiaoping in our meeting in August 1977."

(China Daily September 20, 2006)