China and Germany will jointly establish the country's first Institute of Computational Biology in Shanghai early next year to decipher the secrets of human "life codes," with the eventual purpose of making people much healthier, local scientists announced Monday.

Established by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the German-based Max Planck Society, the institute will become a part of the Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences.

An expert panel organized by the two sides jointly Monday interviewed more than 10 candidate scientists from the world - including the United States, France and Germany - to select some of them to lead three major laboratories in the new institute.

"Although the sequencing of the human genome has long been completed through global efforts, it remains a challenging mission to find out the relations and functions of human genes," Chen Zhu, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Science and a renowned biologist, told Shanghai Daily yesterday.

For instance, researchers at the future institute will conduct various complicated calculations to find out the functions and relations of billions of sections from the nearly 30,000 human genes, scientists said.

If all the molecules in human DNA were pulled straight, they would stretch 100 times of the distance between the Earth and the sun, scientists said.

(Shanghai Daily December 21, 2004)