The fifth World Laureates Forum (WLA Forum), one of the world's largest science and technology gatherings, kicked off in east China's Shanghai on Sunday, with more than 60 top scientists from over 20 countries and regions attending online and offline.

With the theme of "Science forward: Create a bright future," this year's event takes place from Sunday to Monday. The participants include 27 Nobel Prize laureates.

In addition to the founder of the event, the World Laureates Association (WLA), this year's organizers also include the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) and China Media Group (CMG).

Initiated in 2018, the WLA Forum aims at promoting basic science, advocating international cooperation, and supporting younger generations of scientists, according to its website.

Over the past years, the forum has become an important channel to connect the world's top scientists and a significant high-level dialogue platform in the global scientific community.

"Cooperation and openness are an unstoppable trend," said Chen Jining, the newly appointed secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), at the opening ceremony of the forum. "Shanghai will build an innovation platform of better quality and provide convenient services for scientists from around the world."

"China's sci-tech community will stick to the common value of all humanity and follow the idea of sci-tech for good," said Wan Gang, president of CAST. "We will help more Chinese scientists get into the global innovation network."

Shen Haixiong, head of CMG, said the forum gathered top scientists to look for the top intelligence that can light up the future of humanity. "The CMG will tell better science stories and promote the scientific spirit."

Roger Kornberg, chairman of the WLA and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2006, said the world is changing fast and science can help us deal with the challenges in the future.

The inaugural World Laureates Association Prize (WLA Prize) was awarded to two scientists at the opening ceremony.

The 2022 WLA Prize in Life Science or Medicine was awarded to German biochemist Dirk Görlich for his key discoveries elucidating the mechanism and selectivity of protein transport between the cytoplasm and nucleus, and the 2022 WLA Prize in Computer Science or Mathematics was awarded to Michael I. Jordan for his fundamental contributions to the foundations of machine learning and its application.

The monetary award for each prize is 10 million yuan ($1.39 million), according to the official website of the forum.

The WLA Prize is an international science prize established in Shanghai in 2021, initiated by the WLA, and managed by the WLA Foundation. The laureates of the inaugural WLA Prize were officially announced on September 29.

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