English Transcript

Cập nhật 27/06/2008 17:42:00

PODGER: Chris Kimber says TEIN2 is gradually making the study of highly specialised medicine more accessible. He's now looking at getting the training provided to Vietnamese doctors via TEIN2, officially recognised.

KIMBER: What we did really on this trip is dug further into what it takes in Vietnam to become a specialist, what are the requirements for surgical training, how is this monitored and achieved, and we started to look at the role of T-E-N in providing education from sources outside Vietnam and even facilitating it within Vietnam. And I think this is a huge service gap that it's taken us years to uncover.

PODGER: Dr Kimber says one day these big highspeed networks will enable the creation of new libraries - vast archives of medical procedures and experiment results, climate and economic data, and the proceedings of international conferences. At the moment, TEIN2 is limited to large institutions, like universities and teaching hospitals, but Professor Shuji Shimizu says expansion is inevitable.

SHIMIZU: So that's why I can feel excited. I hope this kind of network will be connected soon to all the hospitals in the world so the doctors can use it freely for the consultation, for the learning, and I do believe that it will happen.

PODGER: Bernhard Fabianek, the European Commission's TEIN2 spokesman says the network's used for many other things beside medicine - including tsunami warning systems, economic analysis, and linking radio telescopes on opposite sides of the planet:

FABIANEK: The further apart they are, and you're then looking at the same piece of sky, they create a virtual antenna dish the size of the furthest distance they are, so we have built antenna dishes with a size of 10,000 kilometres, including Australian, Chinese and European telescopes. So with these huge "virtual" dishes you can look even further into the universe than it was possible before. And maybe this is a good analogy of what TEIN actually enables - it's bringing together the best minds.

PODGER: Mr Fabianek says it's hoped TEIN2's bigger, faster successor, Tein3 - will come online later this year, with the bulk of the funding and operations run from Asia rather than Brussels.