An academic lecture is an important platform for scientific professionals to demonstrate their findings in their researches. To the speakers, academic lectures will help promote the exchanges of ideas among peers, stimulate new research ideas and expand the potential collaboration among counterparts. To the audience, academic lectures can help expand their scientific vision and promote interactions between the speakers and the audience. Therefore, to those ambitious and research-minded professionals, to take part in an academic lecture is no doubt important and necessary.

I found an interesting phenomenon when I attended an academic lecture given by an institution recently. The institution was holding an annual academic report where the speakers were all invited senior researchers. The two sessions in the first morning were all given by super-class figures (i.e. former leaders of the institution at the age of nearly 70, with bunches of titles such as candidate for academician and so on and so forth). I thought I might learn something new from the presentations by the two "supermen", but unfortunately I found very little that is worth mentioning. The reason is simple: in recent years, I have attended several times the lectures given by these two scholars and the contents of their presentations were similar. The lectures on the following days were also basically the same. All the presentations by these senior researchers were basically the same findings and development they have presented several times in recent years.

I asked myself after the meeting, why didn't the institution invite those young scientists who are the main force working in the forefront of the research to give the lectures? Their lectures must have more influence, must be more attractive and have more driving forces, because these people are most familiar with the details of their own researches and development as well as their research planning and they are the ones who are most clear about the problems and results in their projects, and they are the ones who can give more thorough, clear, accurate and reasonable answers to the attention and questions of the audience.

Academic innovation and training young scientists are the slogans repeatedly shouted by many scientific institutions in China, but why in practice don't we see such performances? Imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic-capitalism were the three big mountains that oppressed modern China. Mao Zedong led a group of people to overthrow them in 40 years. In today's China, the poisoning of academic circle by formalism, bureaucracy and consumerism is no less weaker than the three big mountains in history, is there anyone who can lead a group of foresighted scholars to abolish the bad practice and improve the situation?

Hu Zimin