1969 - 1970, carp farming in Vietnam went downhill because of two factors: the feeding and the breeds degeneration. Breeding fish can no longer be sold, no one want to raise this kind of fish. He recalls “It was a hard time for carp farming”. Graduated with outstanding result, he was allowed to stay as researcher. Later, he defended both Master and Doctoral thesis in Russia.
Since 1972 - 1998, he worked mainly on carp. Dozens of years of hard work, doctoral or workers must all manually do everything from cleaning ponds, draining ... to get accurate results. The experimental ponds were just like the ponds in every village, fishes from this pond can jump to another pond.
At that time, the Institute had about 70 ponds and the carp crossbreeding research took dozens of it! The effort was unimaginable! Choosing the breed was not just measuring but also checking with bare eyes to pick the best ones.
To the economic research on cross breed the Vietnam carp and Hungary carp, he worked together with his colleague Pham Manh Tuong… and a group of men and women since 1972 marked the success by the report on 1977. Since then, the carp farming industry started to take off. The breeding carps were always “sold out”. Some people tried to hybrid the crossbred fishes with normal fish to earn more profit. The crossbred fishes went down because the farmer harvested all the F1 pure bred and chose the hybrid one to breed, which cause the economic efficient going downhill. Dr. Thien and his partners once again making the pure bred fishes by choosing the breed.
He crossbred from 3 breeds of carp: yellow carp which has thin abdominal meat, might be pinkish or light yellow, sometime mix with some blackness with the Indonesia carp; Vietnam carp has gray back, white belly which has the most tasty meat but take too long a grow; Hungary carp has tasty meat but too much fat which was just imported to Vietnam a few years back.
The research ended in 1997. Then, the author was awarded the Ho Chi Minh Award for the work "Studies on improving the genetic quality of some freshwater fish species" in 2000. Carp breeding was outspreaded everywhere, especially in the northern delta with around 1 kg weight.
He said: “I did not just breeding carp but also breeding bream, then cross breed these species for basic genetic research. Early December 2003, he had the chance to went on a business trip to Trieu Phong, coastal of Quang Tri province. The farmers there offered to be provided with carp fish and tilapia fish for freshwater aquaculture. They said the profit is not as high as shrimp farming but it is more stable and it is the model of using the short term to rise the long term in order to end poverty effectively. Many other places also asked for the pure bred of carp fish, which only the Institute had.
Nowadays, many places are able to produce this pure bred. He is not afraid of losing his copyright and only hope it can help improving carp farming.
A normal working day of Dr. Thien 1 year after his retirement still starts at 5.30 in the morning, arrives at the Institute around 7am and works until 5pm. He is still busy with the work of the project “Improving researching qualification, training and encourage aquaculture for the Institute of Aquaculture Research 1”.
He wishes to have more free time to read more books and to write more books. But thinking about the amount of works, he sighed.
His research of Environmental technology changes gender has not gone into production yet but has opened up many other research directions and has spilted to some other topics the Institute is working on such as: crayfish, bream gender change technology…
When he was at grade 7, he wrote a short story and was praised by Teacher Ha Vi but wasn’t allowed to publish because his teacher was afraid being famous at a young age would bring a lifelong of unhappy. Some of his other handwritten stories went missing after many times moving far away from home to study. He also could not keep any memorabilia of writer Nam Cao – his birth father, because all of his letters was stolen together with his bag of new clothes.
