Quote:
Science 6 May 2011:
Vol. 332 no. 6030 p. 657
DOI: 10.1126/science.332.6030.657
Profile: Jin Huiqing
Car-Crash Epidemiologist Pushes Systemic Attack on Bad Driving
by Richard Stone
China, burdened with traffic casualties, is trying a "three-line
defense": screening drivers for accident-proneness; training drivers to
correct poor driving habits; and monitoring roads for dangerous
conditions.
JINAN, CHINA-As he mulled over topics for a master's dissertation in the
mid-1980s, Jin Huiqing made a fateful decision. He had studied medicine
at Anhui Medical College in Hefei and saw in graphic detail how car
crashes can wreck lives. It dawned on Jin that insights into why some
drivers are accident-prone could have a huge impact on society. He
floated the idea past his thesis adviser, who tried to dissuade him from
the seemingly quixotic quest. "He told me that I may not be able to
finish the degree. No one supported me," Jin says.
Jin proved his professor wrong and went on to pioneer a new field in
China: traffic-accident epidemiology. A quarter-century later, the
fruits of that research are ripening. Based on Jin's findings, the U.N.
Global Compact Cities Programme in 2006 anointed Jinan, capital of
Shandong Province, a traffic safety pilot city. The $70 million project
is due for a 5-year review, and the statistics are tilting in favor of
its chief scientist and mastermind: On Jinan's roads, the rates of
traffic accidents and fatalities have declined steadily. "Jin's ideas
have had a powerful effect in Jinan," says Frederick Dubee, a former
auto-industry captain and executive director of the MBA Center and
Global Management Education Institute at Shanghai University. Experts
have called for extending the safety program to other cities.
Jin has a track record of venturing into uncharted territory-and beating
the odds. At his base in Hefei, capital of Anhui Province, Jin in 1990
opened the Sanlian Accident Prevention Institute, one of the earliest
private R&D centers in China. He expanded his road-safety empire 9 years
later when he founded Anhui Sanlian College, which launched the
country's first degree program on traffic-accident prevention. "It's a
rare example of a good private college in China," says Zhu Qingshi,
former president of Hefei's University of Science and Technology of
China.
More daringly, Jin, 54, is now fishing for genes associated with
accident-prone behavior. At his disposal is a unique resource that he
has amassed: thousands of blood samples and psychological profiles of
safe and accident-prone Chinese drivers.
After being banished to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution,
Jin enrolled at Anhui Medical University in the late 1970s and began
thinking about how to reduce the incidence of noncommunicable diseases.
"I thought, 'Why not view traffic accidents as a disease,'" he says. Car
crashes are a major cause of preventable deaths. Worldwide each year,
approximately 1.2 million people die and 50 million are injured on the
roads. China has more casualties than any other country.
At the time, Jin says, China's public security bureaus "were unwilling
to disclose data about traffic accidents." And academics were not
inclined to pursue such data. "No one cared about the human factors of
accidents," Jin says. He persisted and befriended several security
commanders. From data on 17,124 registered drivers, Jin gleaned that 6%
to 8% were repeat offenders, causing around 40% of crashes involving
more than one car. Compared with safe drivers, he found that levels of
two neurotransmitters-dopamine and serotonin-were significantly lower in
accident-prone drivers, defined as those causing three accidents or more
within 5 years. In a case-control study, Jin found that they scored much
worse than safe drivers on a battery of tests measuring everything from
depth perception and night vision to attitude toward risk taking.
These findings led Jin to develop what he calls "Three Lines of Defense"
against traffic accidents: using written tests and physical exams of,
for example, visual acuity and mental alertness, to screen truck drivers
and other professional drivers for accident-proneness; using simulators
and other methods to train drivers and correct poor driving habits; and
installing cameras to monitor dangerous intersections and road
conditions for driver behavior and road safety. "Three Lines of Defense
is a powerful concept. It looks at accident prevention in a holistic
way," says Dubee, a 35-year veteran of the auto industry who ran
Porsche's operations in Canada. Jin has collaborated with scientists at
the University of Kansas, and in 2005 he was a visiting scholar at
Harvard University.
At the Traffic Command Center here in Jinan, the third of Jin's three
defense lines occupies an entire wall of a two-story room, displaying
video feeds from intersections and computers alongside a map of the
city's road network lit to indicate traffic flow. Traffic police carry
GPS receivers so the officer nearest an accident scene can be dispatched
without delay. Jinan may be the safest place in China to hit the road.
Even as the number of private cars in the city rose from 929,000 in 2006
to more than 1.2 million in 2010, the death toll from traffic accidents
in that period fell from 343 to 263. Although Jinan averages more than
100 traffic accidents each day, it is the only major Chinese city that
hasn't had a single traffic accident in the past 5 years with more than
one fatality, says Lu Dehe, commander of the Jinan Municipal Traffic
Police Department, who credits Jin's methodology for making Jinan safer.
Jin is now writing a second dissertation, on Daoism, for a Ph.D. in
philosophy. And his latest accident-prevention research is more
exploratory. In a genomewide association study, he has found tentative
links between three genes and accident-prone driving. The preliminary
work is "very interesting," says Yang Huanming, director of BGI, China's
genomics institute in Shenzhen, who notes that unraveling susceptibility
to behaviors is fraught with challenges. Genetic studies "will offer a
solution to the mystery of why some drivers are accident-prone,"
predicts Jin, clearly relishing the possibility of blazing another new
trail.
