CAS Launches Science Frontier Extreme Breakthrough Plan with 10 Initial Projects
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has officially launched the 'Science Frontier Extreme Breakthrough Plan' and initiated its first 10 projects. These initial projects focus on major frontier challenges including synthetic new elements, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, microscopic measurements of chemical bonds, and artificial synthetic cells. This initiative represents a major strategic push to accelerate fundamental scientific discoveries by leveraging national research infrastructure and AI for Science platforms. By reforming project evaluation to reduce short-term paper metrics and institutionalize tolerance for failure, CAS aims to create an environment capable of producing world-class original breakthroughs. The plan combines interdisciplinary research across physical, life, earth, and space sciences with major scientific infrastructure and AI computational tools. Procedurally, it introduces pilot evaluation reforms that minimize preset targets, reduce process interference, and focus on long-term impact rather than immediate outputs.
## BACKGROUND
The Chinese Academy of Sciences is China's premier national institution for natural sciences, managing major national scientific infrastructure such as particle accelerators and advanced computing grids. Frontier scientific research increasingly relies on 'AI for Science,' an emerging paradigm that integrates machine learning models to analyze complex experimental data and simulate fundamental physical and biological phenomena.