On the trail of crooked science
By Stephen Pincock
Financial Times
Published: April 12 2008 01:19
In early 2007, the Centre of Mathematical Sciences at China's elite
Zhejiang
University received some disturbing news. According to a series of claims
made in anonymous postings on a Chinese website, a young Harvard professor
of cosmology whom the university had appointed as a visiting scholar was
actually nothing of the sort.
According to the postings, 24-year-old Chen Jia-Zhong hadn't finished his
PhD, as he claimed, nor was he an expert on higher dimensional space.
Instead, they claimed, he had a bachelor's degree from Northwest Normal
University in Lanzhou, China, which he'd earned the year before.
As the Chinese and foreign press later also re****ted, Chen may have used
fake US credentials to get himself invited to give seminars at top Chinese
institutions. But the postings on the website, called New Threads, showed
he
had never worked at Harvard and never published a scientific paper on
physics. In light of the controversy, Zhejiang University had little
choice
but to send him packing. Chen has not commented publicly on the
accusations
or the dismissal.
No country is free of scientific fraud, but China has suffered more than
its
fair share of late. In May 2006, following a string of high-profile
scandals, nearly 120 Chinese researchers living in the US sent an open
letter to science minister Xu Guanghua, saying the country's reputation
was
being damaged and calling for a formal system to protect research
integrity.
A few weeks later, the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told
Science magazine that the money and prestige the Chinese government has
heaped on successful researchers was part of the problem. "Too many
incentives have blurred the reasons for doing science in some people's
minds," Lu Yongxiang said.
In this environment, some Chinese scientists have turned whistleblower.
The
best-known by far is Fang ****-min, the man who runs the New Threads
website,
where the postings about Chen Jia-Zhong appeared. Fang and his site claim
they have exposed more than 600 cases of scientific fraud and
pseudoscience
in the past decade, and by any observer's account, brought down some very
big names.
Fang (who writes under the name Fang Zhouzi) didn't set out to be a thorn
in
the sides of China's misbehaving scientists. Born and raised in the
coastal
town of Yunxiao in Fujian Province, he studied biology at the University
of
Science and Technology of China (USTC) in the city of Hefei. "USTC had a
nickname 'United States Training Center'," he says, "because most of its
graduates went to the US for further study." After five years at USTC,
Fang
met that expectation and in 2000 moved to the small, Midwestern college
town
of East Lansing, Michigan, to become a graduate student at Michigan State
University's department of biochemistry.
While he hoped to make his fortune in the field or at least secure a job
at a major university he also wanted to pursue his passion for
literature.
This prompted him to start a website he called New Threads (Xin Yu Si in
Chinese) as a forum for sharing Chinese classic literature and publi****ng
the creative outpourings of overseas Chinese students.
In 1995, Fang, with a newly obtained PhD on the transcription mechanisms
of
the eukaryotic cell, was offered a position studying the mechanisms of HIV
infection at California's renowned Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
But after 18 months at the institute, the young molecular biologist
decided
to put his scientific aspirations aside to become a freelance science
writer. By then, the focus of New Threads was ****fting. The internet had
finally reached China, and Chinese newspapers and magazines were
establi****ng a web presence. This meant Chinese expatriates such as Fang
in
San Diego could read about what was happening back home. What he read was
a
shock. "Pseudoscience, fraud, misconduct, and corruption were so widely
spread in the Chinese scientific community and no independent critical
voices could be heard," says Fang. "So I decided to do something about it
on
the website."
In August of that year, Fang raised questions about Xiao-Ning Chen, a
Chinese-American researcher, who had returned to China with some gene
libraries collections of DNA fragments cloned from those in an organism
said to be remarkably valuable. "She was called [by the Chinese mainstream
media] 'one of the top biologists in the world', 'gene queen' and hailed
as
'a national hero', and appointed director of a state lab," says Fang. He
was
sceptical: as far as he knew, the gene libraries could be bought from a
biotech company for a few thousand dollars.
Fang found Chen listed on the website of Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los
Angeles, where she worked. He then looked through a catalogue of a biotech
firm's products and found the market value of the gene libraries: about
$3,000 altogether. "I also talked to a member of the Caltech lab which
constructed the libraries, and knew this library could be obtained without
fees for collaboration," he says.
Fang wrote about Chen on New Threads and in Chinese newspapers. He also
drafted an open letter, co-signed by 88 Chinese biologists, some from US
universities, that was published in Science Times, the official newspaper
of
the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The result was immediate. Chen's
involvement had been used to help launch a medical genetics company. After
Fang's claims, advertising was pulled, investors in the company withdrew
and
she returned to the US.
Chen and Cedars-Sinai dispute Fang's version of events. "I did not make
false or exaggerated claims of my status," she said in an e-mail. "The
library was unique at the time and, in fact, remains unique today as well
as
valuable." She is still employed by Cedars-Sinai as a researcher in its
medical genetics division. A senior colleague, who asked to remain
anonymous, says there was some hyped re****ting of Chen's arrival in China,
but that she still has good scientific standing. Chen says some of the
scientists who signed the petition letter later apologised "once they came
to know me and my work through professional interactions, expressing their
sadness at the damage done to the people that were falsely accused and
their
science".
The scandal changed Fang's life, too. Soon, he was being contacted by
people
with tips about other cases of scientific misconduct, fraud and
pseudoscience. Thanks mostly to those tip-offs, many from young scientists
revealing their bosses' misdeeds, the site has exposed what Fang claims is
100 cases of fraud, misconduct or pseudoscience a year. "Our website was
not
a playground for some literary amateurs any more, but became an
influential
forum for discussing Chinese current affairs."
Jia Hepeng, a former re****ter with the state-controlled China Daily who
now
works for the UK government-sup****ted website SciDev.net, agrees. Fang's
exposes became a prime source for the Chinese media, Jia says. At a recent
science journalism meeting in Sydney, he said that checking New Threads
had
become almost a daily routine for re****ters covering science in China.
"[Fang] is welcomed by journalists who can find new stories from him."
When scientists targeted by Fang fall, they fall hard. He credits his site
for exposing Yang Jingan, a professor of Hefei University of Technology
expelled from the Chinese Communist party in 2002 after Fang revealed he
had
frequently plagiarised his work from researchers overseas. In 2006, Yang
Jie, head of the life science and technology college at Tongji University,
Shanghai, was dismissed for similar offences also originally levelled by
Fang.
Later that year, Tsinghua University fired an academic called Liu Hui
after
Fang re****ted that he had taken credit for research done by a US-based
scientist with the same family name and first initial. Liu admitted that
one
paper listed on his CV was not his own but blamed the error on the
university library's data retrieval system. The state-run People's Daily
said Tsinghua fired the 47-year-old professor after conducting an internal
investigation.
None of these scientists has, to the best of the FT's knowledge, commented
publicly on Fang's accusations.
.. . .
Other cases pursued by Fang have been more complicated. In 2006, a
philosopher called Li Ming claimed to have solved a long-standing puzzle
called the "four-colour theorem", which says it is possible to colour in
any
map using just four shades in such a way that adjacent regions are
different
colours from one another.
Li staked his claim in a blog but didn't publish details of his proof. In
June, after the claim had received attention in China, Fang challenged it,
saying that if the philosopher had the proof, he needed to publish and let
it be scrutinised by experts. Li demurred, saying he was afraid of
plagiarism. The debate went on, much to the delight of the Chinese media,
until August, when a furious Li challenged Fang to a deadly wager: if Li
was
able to prove in a public arena that he'd cracked the four-colour theorem,
then Fang ****-min must commit suicide. If Li failed, he would take his own
life. In the end, Li did publish details of his proof by the end of 2006.
Fang's methods are not so histrionic as some of his targets, but he
maintains an air of mystery and melodrama. In photographs, he appears
slender to the point of fragility, with broad shoulders, a long neck and
serious eyes. He's a soft-tempered man, says Jia Hepeng, the former China
Daily re****ter, who has met and interviewed him a number of times. "He
never
uses extreme words. That is his nature."
And yet Fang is careful about controlling the way he is represented in the
media. When I contacted him about this article, he would not meet or speak
on the telephone, saying he preferred to stick with e-mail exchanges to
avoid being misquoted. "I ... don't like face-to-face interviews," he
wrote.
"In fact, I rarely accept such interviews, particularly by Chinese
journalists."
Instead, over the course of eight or nine weeks from March to June last
year, we exchanged more than 30 detailed e-mail messages. He answered my
questions frankly and fully, usually within a day or two, but turned down
several offers of other forms of communication.
Fang has shown similar caution in the past. In 2005, Jim Yardley, a New
York
Times re****ter, referred to him obliquely in a story about a contentious
plan to dam the Nu River. Yardley described how "two prominent scholars
toured the Nu on a trip sponsored by the dam developers and attracted
wide public attention by attacking the environmentalists". Fang was one of
the scholars and Yardley remembers him insisting on e-mail interviews. In
the end, Fang disagreed with the thrust of Yardley's piece and wrote a
long
letter to the paper, complaining the re****ter had not paid proper
attention
to his e-mails. Yardley told me he preferred not be drawn into a slanging
match with Fang over the story.
In 2004, Fang was named by the popular magazine Nanfang Renwu Zhoukan
(Southern Personalities Weekly) as one of China's most influential public
intellectuals. He responded to his listing by asking to "resign" from the
list, which also included the exiled poet Bei Dao and Hu Shuli, once
dubbed
the most dangerous woman in China on account of the critical and
investigative writing in her publication Caijing magazine.
When Fang started New Threads as a young, literary graduate student in
Michigan, he was particularly fascinated by the works of Lu Xun. Lu, a
writer of wry short stories and essays, lived from 1881 to 1936 and is
often
referred to as the father of modern Chinese literature. Lu had also given
up
a medical science career to be a writer, and was a vocal critic of social
problems in China; his writing was influential in the "May 4th" social
movement that preceded the founding of the Chinese Communist party. In the
1990s, Fang spent hours digitalising Lu's works and posting them on the
website. Xun had "great influence on my writing and philosophy of life",
says Fang. "I admire his deep insights into Chinese people, culture,
history
and society, and restless fighting spirit."
.. . .
Yet Fang says he is a reluctant fraud-buster. "Writing essays about
science
and history is my real interest," he says. "I never planned to become a
debunker and don't have interest in being one. It just happened. Since
misconducts are so rampant in China, and nobody cares or dares to stand up
against it, I have to do something."
In the west, scientific conduct is policed by principles of peer review,
and
cases of fraud are often investigated by universities or research
institutions. The same principles apply in China, but, say Fang and
others,
fraud appears to be so ingrained in the research culture that a larger
response is needed. He ****gang from the Institute of Biophysics says: "The
policing of these things in China is very weak. Most authorities will try
to
cover up scandals."
"Scientific misconduct in China is not a simple phenomenon," Fang tells
me.
"It's also a complex political and social problem. Chinese society must
have
a radical change first in many aspects. We need to have a democratic
government, independent scientific and educational institutions, and free
press."
However, Fang's methods are raising questions. Liu Huajie, a professor of
the philosophy of science at Peking University, Beijing, says: "Most
scholars in China, including me, sup****ted his actions at the beginning."
Liu became one of Fang's major backers, editing a book of his essays and
asking him to deliver lectures at the university. But more recently, he
and
other academics have turned against Fang. They accuse him of arrogance and
say his attacks are too strident, that he destroys reputations without
solid
evidence. "He seems [to] know everything," says Liu. He thinks Fang's view
of Chinese science is too negative. "There are many excellent Chinese
scientists working hard in China, but he likes to find the ugly small part
of them."
Fang, meanwhile, says he does his best to avoid destroying reputations
without evidence. "My reputation is built on the nearly perfect record of
our fighting with misconduct and corruption for almost eight years," he
says. "If I breach the public trust, I will destroy my own reputation." He
usually doesn't accept anonymous submissions, he says, although they can
be
published using pseudonyms.
And he says he only publishes allegations that he thinks are reasonable
and
have sup****ting evidence. "I always welcome and publish the rebuttals from
the accused and his or her sup****ters. If an allegation turns out to be
unfounded, I will promptly clarify and apologise for it. This has happened
several times."
But science journalist Jia Hepeng still has concerns. "As a scientific
critic, he has been bold and keen-edged enough, but as an editor, he has
not
been professional enough by allowing criticisms which might not have
been
sup****ted by thorough investigation," he says.
This creeping scepticism about Fang's work has resulted in a turning of
the
tables: according to Jia Hepeng, Fang is now in a kind of academic exile.
"Fang has been totally excluded by any establishment, not only the
government but also any established institutions." If so, Fang seems
unconcerned. "Since I never seek recognition from any establishment, I
don't
know [if] that's true or not," he says. "If that's true, it won't bother
me.
But I have been frequently invited to give talks by Chinese universities
and
institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, so if there is any
exclusion,
it's not that exclusive."
Fang says New Threads has been blocked by the Chinese government since
1999.
"People inside China can access our site by several mirrors, but the
mirrors
sometimes get blocked or are forced offline."
For years, Fang has spent three or four hours a day maintaining the
website
and investigating claims. He splits his time between Beijing, where his
wife
works for the Chinese state news agency, and San Diego. His income comes
from royalties paid by a biotech firm for a protein he and others
discovered
and from columns he writes for three newspapers in Beijing. He has also
published 14 books in Chinese on various science-related topics.
Fang has also spent the past seven years in legal battles stemming from
New
Threads. He has been sued for defamation many times, and lost three
lawsuits
in Chinese courts. "Because the Chinese legal system is very corrupt and a
ruling is often not made according to the evidence, it is not surprising
that I lost these libel cases even though I did nothing wrong," he says.
Some scientists in China and overseas have rallied round Fang,
establi****ng
funds to help with his legal fees.
In December 2006, the journal Science re****ted that Zhang Feng, a
Florida-based financial analyst and college classmate of Fang's, had
established the Organization for Scientific and Academic Integrity in
China,
to raise money for Fang and other campaigners. In China, another
foundation
is co-organised by physicist He Zuoxiu and science writer Guo Zhengyi.
"Ironically, the courts' rulings were so absurd that it actually helped me
win more sympathy and sup****t from academics and [the] public," says Fang.
The Chinese authorities, meanwhile, haven't been completely silent on
scientific fraud. In late 2005, the National Natural Science Foundation of
China (NSFC), China's main basic science funding agency, named three
researchers found guilty of misconduct. According to a re****t in Science,
the NSFC in 1998 formed a 19-member committee of distinguished scientists
to
investigate scientific misconduct. It opened files on more than 542 cases,
and re****tedly more than 10 per cent of those resulted in a finding of
misconduct.
But almost all were kept from the public eye. More recently, the Ministry
of
Science and Technology opened an office of research integrity in early
2007
to build up a fraud investigation team, handle new cases and hand down
punishments for scientific frauds.
Earlier this year, in Beijing, a man dressed as an express mail courier
knocked on Fang's door. "I was cautious and hesitating to open the door
because I wasn't expecting any express mail," he says. "Then he told me:
'You know what you have done,' and left." Later, Fang contacted building
security and looked over a CCTV tape which showed that two further men had
been hiding out of sight. "Two days later, when I attended the press
conference for my new book, one of them came to threaten me again," he
says.
Fang doesn't know who sent the men, and has re****ted the incidents to the
police. "I do sometimes feel vulnerable, since I am facing some very
powerful persons without any morals," he says. "But it won't stop me."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4177b622-047c-11dd-a2f0-000077b07658.html
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