Chen Wei, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering: Forging more core technologies to produce more hardcore products
Forge ahead and forge more core technologies
■Chen Wei, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and researcher of the Academy of Military Medicine of the Academy of Military Sciences
This is Chen Wei.
After the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, the Central Military Commission issued an order and rushed to Wuhan with a team of military medical experts and experienced an arduous fight against the epidemic with the people of the whole country.
I will never forget the scene when I first arrived in Wuhan.
The wide streets are empty, the whole city has no Spring Festival atmosphere, it is as quiet as an empty city.
When we docked with the local authorities for the first time, we learned that Wuhan's nucleic acid testing capacity was urgently lacking at that time. The daily testing capacity was only about 350 people, and the report was only available within 3 days.
Before going to Wuhan, the tasks we received were epidemic research and judgment, vaccine research and development, etc. Nucleic acid testing was not in the original task.
But I am well aware that behind each sample, there are living lives.
In the current pandemic, saving lives is a big deal.
So I immediately decided to pick up the burden of nucleic acid testing first.
In just one day, we completed the construction of the tent-type negative pressure laboratory and testing platform.
The 24-hour "three shifts" and "white plus black" continuous operations can detect more than 1,000 people a day, and reports can be issued at that time.
This played a key role at the end of January and early February when Wuhan nucleic acid testing was in a bottleneck period.
On the first day of the new year, President Xi issued an order to speed up the research and development of therapeutic drugs and vaccines. Our team has been focusing on the research and development of major infectious disease vaccines for a long time, and has successfully developed recombinant Ebola vaccines. It has a mature technology platform.
For this vaccine research, we are obliged and duty-bound.
On March 16, the vaccine was approved to enter the clinic, and the first immunization was completed at 20:18 that day. This is the world's first new crown vaccine to enter clinical trials.
The chief scientist of the WHO stated that the Chinese vaccine has been proven safe and effective in clinical trials at this stage.
What moved me most was the volunteers. There were 616 volunteers in Phase I and Phase II clinical trials.
The oldest subject is Mr. Xiong, 84 years old.
He said that he was very moved to see our support for Wuhan, but it is better to be moved than to act. He wanted to participate in the fight against the epidemic while his bones were still strong.
It is the unconditional trust and support of the people that gave our team great encouragement.
Looking back on the 113 days in Wuhan, I was busy every day from opening my eyes until three or four o’clock in the morning of the next day, and I had to devote myself to intense work in the morning. That’s how I kept busy day after day. The "take off" state is always the state of rushing forward with the accelerator pedal.
I firmly believe that as long as we maintain this momentum, there will be no "Luzhangguan" or "Lazikou" that cannot be overcome on the road of scientific research.
Some time ago, the state awarded such a lofty honor to the "people's hero"
To me.
I am well aware that this heavy honor does not belong to me personally, but to all members of the military medical expert group who live and die with me in Wuhan, and belong to all the comrades in the military medical and scientific research front who are involved in epidemic prevention and control.
In the future, we will continue to stick to our original aspirations, forge ahead, forge more core technologies, come up with more hard-core products, and make our due contributions to safeguarding people's lives and health, and safeguarding national biosecurity.