On November 1, 1949, the Chinese Academy of Sciences was established in Beijing, less than five weeks after the founding of the People's Republic, with Guo Moruo, a scholar of ancient China and of the oracle bones, as its first president. The academy was set up to bring the scattered research institutes of the country under one body and to give science a place in the plan for reconstruction, and its first institutes came from the former Academia Sinica and from the research institute in Beijing. The work began at once.
In its early years the academy ran most of the research in the country. It set up institutes for physics and chemistry and biology and geology and for the social sciences, and it sent students abroad and drew back those who had stayed overseas, and its first tasks were practical, for surveys of minerals and soils and water were needed for industry and for farming, and the academy took part in the search for oil and in the planning of the first steel and machinery plants. The needs were plain.
The academy also became the home of work that is now part of the record, including the synthesis of insulin in 1965 and the study of the structure of a protein, and it trained the generation of researchers who carried the work on. It answered to the state. The record is long. Its institutes were reorganised several times as policy changed, and during the years of the Cultural Revolution much of its work stopped and many of its members were sent to the countryside.
Reforms from the late 1970s gave the academy a wider role, and it now runs a large group of institutes and two universities and takes part in space and computing and life science programmes. The scale grew. The body that began in 1949 with a handful of institutes has become one of the largest research organisations in the world.