Chen Jing: I have climbed the dangerous peak of science all my life

【Chinese New Year Visit】

Walking on the streets of Kunming, Yunnan, Chen Jing, a professor at Yunnan University who is thin and plainly dressed, is an ordinary old man. Back in the laboratory, Chen Jing is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering who has served the country and the people all his life and has continuously climbed the dangerous peaks of science. Chen Jing, who is 84 years old, has always run in the battlefield of scientific research, overcoming difficulties, sharing worries for the country and benefiting the people.

On the eve of the Spring Festival, with New Year blessings, the reporter came to Chen Jing's home. The old man smiled kindly, told the past, and spoke peacefully, while the reporter listened, but it was thrilling and breathless. Saving Yang Zonghai is one of them.

In June 2008, Yangzonghai, one of the nine plateau lakes in Yunnan, was suddenly polluted by devastating arsenic, and the water quality dropped from Class II to inferior Class V water, losing its drinking and irrigation functions, and the lake was on the verge of death. Yunnan Province conducted a public bidding for the Yangzong Seawater Pollution Reduction and Arsenic Removal Project from the world, and 5 were selected from 49 bidding units at home and abroad. At that time, some people believed that Yangzonghai covered an area of 31 square kilometers and stored 600 million cubic meters of water, and it would take at least 3 to 5 years to control arsenic pollution, with a cost of 4 billion yuan to 7 billion yuan. Because there was no feasible plan, the bidding units withdrew one after another, and yangzonghai governance fell into difficulties.

At the moment of crisis, Chen Jing stepped forward and led the graduate students to invent the sedimentation adsorption method with high arsenic removal efficiency, simple operation, low cost and ecological safety in just over 3 months. In 2009, after yangzonghai used the technology, the arsenic concentration of the whole lake dropped significantly, and after two years of successful treatment, the lake water returned to class II to III water quality, while the actual cost was only 29 million yuan. After 6 years of observation, the water quality of Yangzong Seawater has been stable, and the new technology and engineering application of arsenic removal have generally reached the international leading level, and in 2018, it won the special prize of The Yunnan Provincial Science and Technology Progress Award.

Next to Chen Jing, there are piles of paper materials, with many annotations and red lines on the materials. "These are all water pollution control materials, I have read more than 200 articles, in the past 10 years I mainly study water pollution control, from the metallurgical field to the environmental protection field, just like before I transferred from the chemical field to the metallurgical field."

Every change in Chen Jing's research direction is mostly to complete the major national scientific and technological research tasks. At the end of the 1970s, Gansu Jinchang is China's largest platinum group metal production base, Chen Jing's Kunming Precious Metals Research Institute undertook the national key research project - a new process of extracting precious metals from secondary copper-nickel alloys, Chen Jing is the technical leader of the refining section. At the end of 1980, serious technical problems occurred, and the burden was on Chen Jing. He gave up the opportunity to return to Yunnan for the Spring Festival, braved the cold, and after 20 days of day and night fighting, finally overcame the difficulties and opened up the process.

In the end, the process project won the first prize of scientific and technological achievements of China Nonferrous Metals Corporation in 1983, and Chen Jing ranked first. Since then, he has been awarded the title of the first batch of "young and middle-aged experts with outstanding contributions at the national level", and in 1985, the project won the first prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award.

It is already an old age, Chen Jing is still trying his best to serve the country, taking care of his wife who has been bedridden for 10 years at home every day, insisting on reading a large number of scientific research materials, and insisting on going to the laboratory of Yunnan University every week to guide the team's research experiments. Chen Jing has a lot of thoughts on the current scientific research system, he said: "For basic research talents, we must give a more relaxed working environment, and we must let them settle down, drill in, and enjoy it, in order to have a breakthrough in the field of basic research." For applied scientific research, the final industrialization results should be used to test the research results. ”

(Reporter Daniel Zhang)