Chinese Academicians Who Have Lost Their Social Conscience
In the Western world, there is a very popular saying: “Intellectuals are the conscience of society.” It is said that before his death the famous scholar Mr. Zhong Jingwen once said: “Intellectuals should be the conscience of society, the mainstay of society.” From intellectuals in the West “being” the conscience of society, to in China “should be” the conscience of society, people can probably easily see the difference between the two.
What is called conscience is actually a person’s moral standard and values, the bottom line by which a person judges right and wrong. In English it is conscience, meaning sense of right or wrong. What is called “the conscience of society” refers to the moral bottom line of a society. The reason people say “intellectuals are the conscience of society” is that the duty of intellectuals is to seek truth, and their instinct is to make moral judgments on social phenomena according to their own knowledge and reasoning. Although the concept of “intellectuals” still does not have a universally accepted meaning (and perhaps never will), academicians at the very top of a country’s academic pyramid surely count as intellectuals, don’t they? Then a natural question is: are China’s academicians “the conscience of society”?
After careful study, the answer I have reached is that China’s academicians are not only not the conscience of Chinese society, they simply have no social conscience at all. “Social conscience” is different from “the conscience of society”; it refers to a person’s or a group’s sense of responsibility and moral obligation toward society. Without social conscience, of course one cannot become “the conscience of society.” The fact is that for decades, China’s academicians, for their own private interests, have constantly acted against their consciences, deceiving the public and deceiving society. Because of their special status, and society’s blind trust in them, the harm academicians have caused to China’s development has been very serious.
To say that “China’s academicians have no social conscience” may seem like “striking down a whole crowd with one blow.” True, among China’s academicians there are people of high academic level, people of good moral character, and some who have both. But taken as a whole, this is a corrupt institution. To judge whether a group or institution is corrupt, one does not look at what proportion of its members are corrupt, but whether it has a mechanism for survival of the fittest and replacement of the old by the new, whether it has a strict and comprehensive self-supervision mechanism, whether evil suppresses good or good suppresses evil within it, and above all how the group behaves collectively on major issues of right and wrong. In short, one must listen to what it says and watch what it does. By the above standards, China’s academicians simply fail.
The academician system of New China began in 1955, when they were called members of academic divisions. From 1993 on, China’s division members were renamed academicians, and within a few years their number doubled. Correspondingly, the academic and moral level of academicians also declined sharply. (Yi Ming: The Evolution of China’s Academician System). This series of articles is divided into three parts, and will expose, analyze, and criticize the corrupt Chinese academician system from different angles, tearing away the mysterious veil draped over China’s academicians. The issue of China’s academicians’ academic level is not within the scope of this series. This series discusses only their moral problems.
I. Ten-Thousand-Jin Yield per Mu and Corpses Littering the Land
As early as 1958, in the Great Leap Forward era, Qian Xuesen, then a member of an academic division, was already touting in the newspapers the possibility of “ten-thousand-jin yield per mu.” At the beginning of one article, he quoted a folk rhyme: “The year before last we carried grain for sale with baskets, last year we rocked grain for sale on boats. This year trucks can’t hold it all, next year even trains will seem too small.” At that time some places in Henan had successively “created” records of more than 2,000 jin and 3,530 jin of grain per mu, so Member Qian asked and answered himself: “Has land already reached the top of the amount of grain it can give people? Scientific calculation tells us it is still far from it!” He said that of the solar energy reaching the earth’s surface, if only 30% were utilized, yield per mu could reach “more than 20 times two thousand and some hundred jin!” (Qian Xuesen: How Much Grain Yield per Mu Could There Be?). A year later, his calculations made the yield potential precisely 58,500 jin per mu. (Qian Xuesen: Mechanical Problems in Agriculture). It is said that his articles really did make Mao Zedong believe the falsely reported grain yields from below, and worry about the question, “What should we do if there is too much grain?” (Ding Shu, Human Disaster, chapter 4: Boasting and Launching Wild “Satellites”).
In theory, Qian Xuesen may not have been wrong. If plants could utilize 30% of solar energy, and one fifth of the plant were edible grain, then yields above 50,000 jin per mu would indeed be possible. But in reality, these two “ifs” were obviously impossible, even judging by today’s scientific and technological level. And placed in the years 1958 and 1959, when crisis was already everywhere and starving corpses littered the land, publicly and loudly promoting this “ten-thousand-jin yield per mu” theory was clearly adding fuel to the fire, making things worse, aiding tyranny, and acting as an accomplice. This may be the earliest example of Chinese academicians losing their social conscience.
Mr. Qian Xuesen spent the 1950s making prolonged efforts before finally returning to China from the United States, was elected in 1957 as part of China’s second group of academic division members, and joined the Chinese Communist Party at the end of 1958. Mr. Qian’s purpose in returning to China was nothing other than to serve his motherland, so why did he commit such a low-level error and do something that today seems so foolish? Even a pampered young master who cannot tell the five grains apart should have known how impossible it was to raise average grain yield per mu at that time from several hundred jin to tens of thousands of jin, shouldn’t he? What is more, from “the year before last we carried grain for sale with baskets” suddenly soaring to “this year trucks can’t hold it all,” I’m afraid even children could not be fooled by that. In the article “The Evolution of China’s Academician System,” I once said: “The implementation of political standards in academician elections made academicians appendages of the political system and caused them to lose their social conscience.” Mr. Qian Xuesen suffered under the McCarthy anti-communist hysteria in the United States, and after returning to China personally heard of and witnessed the cruel severity of the Anti-Rightist Movement; these things could not possibly have had no effect on him. Putting personal interests and group interests before the interests of the people and society is the main reason academicians lost their social conscience.
Besides Qian Xuesen, another person who lost his social conscience during the Great Leap Forward was the first-term division member and economist Xue Muqiao. Xue Muqiao had served as director of the State Statistical Bureau and also worked in the Central Finance and Economics Group. He clearly knew the figures reported by officials in various places were false, yet he still instructed his subordinates: “No one can withstand the current wave of the Great Leap Forward, so report it according to the provincial party committee’s opinion.” (Ding Shu, Human Disaster, chapter 4: Boasting and Launching Wild “Satellites”).
The Great Leap Forward caused tens of millions of Chinese civilians to die of hunger. I have no intention here of calculating how many of them were victims of the ten-thousand-jin-yield theory. Looking back today, the essence of the Great Leap Forward was ignorance, and yet the most knowledgeable people in China at the time, namely those division members, did not use their knowledge to shoulder the heavy responsibility of being “the conscience of society.” On the contrary, they used their knowledge and status to intensify this ignorant behavior, making ignorance wear the outer garment of “science.” It should be admitted that in that era, division members who actively cast aside their social conscience were very few. But the overwhelming majority of division members, through silence, passively supported those people who had lost their conscience. Qian Xuesen could have remained silent, but he chose to speak falsehoods. Other division members should have spoken the truth (of course that would have involved risk—otherwise why call it the conscience of society?), but they almost all chose silence. Poor division members, why did you all make the wrong choice?
II. China’s Academicians Beneath the “Gene Queen’s” Skirt
On the afternoon of August 25, 2000, Qiang Boqin, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the National Human Genome Center at Beijing, accepted on behalf of the state a donation from Professor Chen Xiaoning, a Chinese-American scientist praised by the Chinese media as the “Gene Queen,” at the Great Wall Hotel in Beijing. On that same day, Chen Xiaoning was hired as director and professor of the Molecular Cytogenetics Laboratory of the National Human Genome Center at Beijing. (Beijing Evening News, August 28, 2000). It was said that Chen Xiaoning’s donation was a one-of-a-kind human gene clone library in the world, of value impossible to estimate for the time being. Before that, major Chinese media had all devoted a great deal of space to introducing this Chen Xiaoning. According to an article in Beijing Youth Daily: “Last night at 10:30, when Professor Chen Xiaoning, just back from the United States, carefully placed plates of living genes one by one into a minus-86-degree freezer, it marked that our country had become, after the United States, another nation to master top-level gene technology.” (Tao Junfeng: Three Major Gene Libraries Successfully Transported Back to China Yesterday). On July 8 and July 15, Beijing Television’s China Talent Report program said: “According to rough estimates by certain informed persons, her (Chen Xiaoning’s) personal worth is now as high as 500 million yuan.” These “informed persons” included famous Chinese professors and academicians.
However, this farce came to an abrupt end not long after it began. Fang Zhouzi, living in California in the United States, had never heard that nearby UCLA had such a Chinese “Gene Queen,” so his curiosity was aroused, and as a result the Chinese people were shown an unprecedented fraud in the history of Chinese science. To make a long story short, this “Gene Queen” was actually a lab technician at an American university, and the “world’s one-of-a-kind, immeasurably valuable gene libraries” she brought back could in fact be bought on the American market for a few thousand dollars. The real purpose of Chen Xiaoning’s donation was to create momentum for her own company so it could enter the Hong Kong stock market. An open letter drafted by Fang Zhouzi immediately exposed this sham. (Fang Zhouzi et al.: Open Letter on the “Chen Xiaoning Brought Back Three Major Gene Libraries” Incident).
The question is: when this farce was being grandly staged in Chinese newspapers and on television, what were China’s academicians doing? The Chinese people support more than a thousand academicians—how is it that when a foreign scientific fraudster was wildly deceiving the Chinese people, it took a righteous man living abroad to expose the fraud? If China’s academicians could not see through the fraud, then their academic level was too low; if they saw through it but kept silent, then their moral level was too low. Whichever is true, China’s academicians are unfit to be academicians.
In fact, China’s academicians were far more than silent; some of them actually became drummers and billboards for this ugly farce. Academician Qiang Boqin, who “accepted the donation” “on behalf of the state,” also served as chief member of the domestic advisory group for Chen Xiaoning’s “Boning Gene Company,” and listed second was another academician, Wu?. Although Academician Wu? later denied ties with “Boning,” that was long after the ugly show had already been exposed. (Wu?: Statement Regarding the “Promotional Materials of Boning Gene Company”). Other members of Boning’s domestic advisory group included: Professor Jin Li, then dean of the School of Life Sciences at Fudan University; Professor Yang Huanming, then director of the Beijing Genomics Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; doctoral advisor Shen Yan of the National Human Genome Research Center; doctoral advisors Qiu Jingying, Chen Shanshan, and Dai Zhuohua of Peking University; doctoral advisors Fang Fude and Cai Youyu of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and so on. (See: Boning Gene Company, founder, advisers, product introduction,
http://xys.org/xys/ebooks/others/sc...nelibrary25.txt). Without Fang Zhouzi, Academician Qiang and Academician Wu might long since have become millionaires, and those professors and doctoral advisors probably would long since have been promoted to academicians. No wonder some people hate Fang Zhouzi so much. How many people’s bright futures he ruined!
By now, the truth has long since become known to the whole world. This was a great humiliation for China’s intellectual world and a grave betrayal of Chinese society by China’s academicians. But did the Chinese Academy of Sciences apologize to the Chinese people? Did China’s academicians examine themselves? Did Academician Qiang Boqin receive any punishment? No. It was as if nothing had happened, and everything was slowly forgotten.
In the 1960s, China had a very famous play called Never Forget. Yes, never forget! If you forget, ugly things will come back again.
III. The World-Shaking “Nucleic Acid Nutrition” Fraud
Almost on the heels of the “Gene Queen” farce, mainland China was suddenly swept by a craze of “eat genes to supplement genes.” Advertisements for nucleic-acid nutritional products bearing the portraits of 38 Nobel Prize winners flooded the major Chinese media. Common people who did not understand the matter pulled out wad after wad of cash as if enchanted, buying expensive various nucleic-acid nutritional products, among which “Zhen-Ao Nucleic Acid” was the hottest, and its sales points spread across the country in an instant. In October 2000, the Ministry of Health held in Qingdao the “2000 International Academic Forum on Health Care for Middle-Aged and Elderly People and China International Health Products Exposition,” and “Zhen-Ao Nucleic Acid Gene Nutrient” won the only gold prize. On January 5, 2001, Guangming Daily published a signed article: “Let Life Nucleic Acids Benefit Humanity—On China’s Famous Gene Scientist, Professor Cui Xiuyun, Doctoral Advisor at Dalian Medical University.” In that interview report, this famous “gene scientist” became so carried away that she actually boasted that the “life nucleic acid” she had “invented” was the very “elixir of immortality” Qin Shi Huang had searched everywhere for.
Anyone who has studied biochemistry to the undergraduate level should know that human food contains four major categories of macromolecular compounds: protein, nucleic acids, fats, and carbohydrates (mainly starch). These compounds must be broken down in the human stomach and intestines into the monomers or small polymers composing them before they can be absorbed and utilized by humans. So although what you eat may be protein, what is absorbed and utilized is amino acids; what you eat may be nucleic acid, but what is absorbed and utilized is nucleosides or nucleotides. Since these four major categories of substances exist in large quantities in ordinary food, and since human cells themselves have biosynthetic ability, as long as one’s diet is normal, almost nobody needs to separately supplement either protein or nucleic acids. A simple analogy: a person may choose to eat rice, or may choose to use physical and chemical methods to divide the rice he wants to eat into protein, nucleic acids, fats, and carbohydrates, and then put them separately into capsules. Should one eat the rice, or swallow the capsules? If one is not ill, the only reason for choosing the latter is ignorance. And anyone who incites others to choose the latter, if not ignorant, is certainly a fraud wanting to profit from it.
The fabricators of the “nucleic acid nutrition” case were precisely such a group of frauds.
On the same day Guangming Daily’s signed article was published, Fang Zhouzi published an article on the New Threads website, “A New Commercial Fraud and a New ‘Gene Queen’,” tearing away the deceptive mask of nucleic-acid nutritional products.
Fang Zhouzi again! Could such a simple scientific fraud really have fooled all the scientists in China? Ordinary professors and doctoral advisors might be fooled, but were even the academicians representing the highest level of Chinese science and technology also fooled? If anyone really thinks so, then that person is the one being fooled. Just one week after Fang Zhouzi fired the first shot, Li Zaiping, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, published “An Open Letter to Guangming Daily,” denying that he had ever praised Cui Xiuyun’s nucleic-acid research. On January 31, Professor Yang Huanming, then secretary-general of China’s major “Human Genome Project,” publicly pointed out that so-called nucleic-acid food was not much different from rice flour in nutritional value. So the academic level of leading figures in China’s intellectual world had not fallen below the undergraduate level after all. They simply lacked the courage to fire the first shot.
However, although the “nucleic acid nutrition” case involved far less knowledge and a much lower academic threshold than the “Gene Queen” case, it was astonishingly difficult to win that battle. This war lasted nearly a year from beginning to end, with both sides going back and forth through several rounds; it truly had many twists and turns. On one side were a few unarmed weak scholars led by Fang Zhouzi, while on the other side stood powerful forces including the Ministry of Health, the Chinese Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and the “China Health Care Science and Technology Society.” Readers should be especially reminded that this Ministry of Health is the same yamen that concealed the epidemic during this year’s SARS storm.
What did China’s academicians do during the “nucleic acid nutrition” war? Lu Jiaxi, academician and former president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who claimed he was “virtually completely ignorant of medicine,” wrote a preface in 1995 for a book advocating nucleic-acid nutrition, Orthomolecular Nucleic Acid and Metabolic Therapy, saying, “I wish orthomolecular medicine and its branch nucleic-acid metabolic therapy comparatively healthy and smooth development in China, vigorous growth, and rapid flowering and fruiting, to benefit the people’s health.” This several-hundred-word preface was taken out and heavily hyped five or six years later by his two students, Yang Bingyuan and Wang Zhongkan, and was widely printed in Chinese newspapers and magazines. Another academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhang Shuzheng, researcher at the Institute of Microbiology, publicly defended “nucleic acid nutrition” at symposiums and hearings. (Fang Zhouzi: My Accusation: Experts in China’s Biochemistry Community Gave False Testimony to the Public). This was the performance of China’s academicians.
By contrast, foreign scientists dared to uphold fairness. On March 1, 2001, Nature published an article commenting on the current state of Chinese science and technology and mentioned China’s “nucleic acid nutrition.” Although the article did not directly criticize “nucleic acid nutrition,” it very clearly implied contempt for it; this can be seen from the title, “China’s hopes and hypes.” . On March 6, Nobel laureate Watson wrote to the New Threads website denying that nucleic acid has a nutritional function. (New Threads: Nobel Laureate Watson Writes to Deny “Nucleic Acid Nutrition”). Three other Nobel laureates—David Baltimore and Paul Berg of the United States, and Werner Arber of Switzerland—also stated on different occasions that nucleic acid has no nutritional value. (Bi Sheng: Nobel Laureates Deny Nucleic Acid Nutrition). On August 10, 2001, the American journal Science published an article by Xinhua reporter Xiong Lei: “CHINA: Biochemist Wages Online War Against Ethical Lapses.” To this point, only then did this battle, which had made Chinese scientists lose face, undergo a fundamental turning point. On August 24, Southern Weekend published an article by Li Hujun and Zhu Pengcheng: “Zou Chenglu: ‘The Nucleic Acid Controversy’ Is Not an Academic Dispute,” the first time a Chinese academician stood on the side of justice in this battle. By then, more than eight months had passed since the war began. In October, the Chinese Biochemical Society established a “house rule”: “Scholars may not act as ‘plants’ for merchants.” (Xue Hui: Scholars May Not Act as “Plants” for Merchants).
Although nucleic-acid nutritional products have not yet completely disappeared in China, they can be said to be barely clinging to life. Looking back now, if Fang Zhouzi had not started the fight and if foreign volunteer troops had not joined the battle, China’s common people might still be being deceived to this day, while those scientific fraudsters would have become world-class millionaires. The Chinese have supported more than a thousand academicians of the two academies, yet in the end it was scientists abroad who had to serve as the conscience of Chinese society. Where did the social conscience of Chinese scientists themselves go?
IV. Summary
In the Chinese primer classic Three Character Classic there are lines such as: “Dogs guard the night, chickens announce the dawn,” and “Silkworms spin silk, bees make honey.” The meaning is that every kind of living thing in this world has its own function and duty. In human society, when a nation is invaded by foreign enemies, soldiers have an inescapable duty to rush to the front and defend home and country. When a community unfortunately catches fire, firefighters must also struggle to save the victims’ lives and property. Failure to do these things is dereliction of duty; in lighter cases one is dismissed, in serious cases punished by law.
In human society, the duty of scientists, besides doing their own research in the laboratory, should also include spreading scientific knowledge to society. And the duty of academicians is to represent the scientific community and make their attitude clear on major issues of right and wrong. Yet from the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s to the two major science-related fraud cases of the 21st century, China’s academicians not only did not state their position (or state it in a timely manner), did not stand on the side of justice (or stand there in a timely manner), and did not protect the interests of society and the people; on the contrary, they participated in these affairs and fanned the flames, turning what were originally very stupid and simple tricks into things tangled and unfathomable.
Why is scientific fraud so prevalent in China? Because it keeps succeeding.
Why do scientific frauds so easily succeed in China? Because China’s academicians have no social conscience!
When one sees injustice on the road, one draws one’s sword to help; one acts bravely for a just cause, helping the weak and aiding the poor—are these not the basic morals scientists should have? Even taking ten thousand steps back, a person should at least know how to repay gratitude, shouldn’t he? Even the scholar-officials of China’s feudal society knew that since they received salary from the imperial court, they should be loyal to it. In 2000, in response to some people exploiting the momentum of the Human Genome Project to hype “nucleic-acid nutritional products,” Francis Collins, head of the American Human Genome Project, publicly came forward to denounce these commercial schemes and called on American scientists to leave their laboratories and spread knowledge about genes to the public.
(http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,36328,00.html). In Europe and America, the main reason pseudoscience cannot stand firm is that scientists, guided by their consciences, dare and are willing to step forward and state their positions. But look at China’s academicians: they enjoy the supreme honor given by the people, and enjoy treatment that only a very few senior officials can receive, yet not only do they fail to find ways to repay the people and serve them, when the people are harmed by scientific fraudsters they feign deafness and dumbness, and even take part and profit from it. I cannot help but ask: academicians, where is your conscience?
Note: Chinese Academy of Sciences academicians Zou Chenglu, He Zuoxiu, and others have made unremitting efforts in opposing pseudoscience in China, and I express my respect for their character and contributions. Regrettably, they are only a very small minority among China’s academicians, and their actions are only individual actions.
In the Western world, there is a very popular saying: “Intellectuals are the conscience of society.” It is said that before his death the famous scholar Mr. Zhong Jingwen once said: “Intellectuals should be the conscience of society, the mainstay of society.” From intellectuals in the West “being” the conscience of society, to in China “should be” the conscience of society, people can probably easily see the difference between the two.
What is called conscience is actually a person’s moral standard and values, the bottom line by which a person judges right and wrong. In English it is conscience, meaning sense of right or wrong. What is called “the conscience of society” refers to the moral bottom line of a society. The reason people say “intellectuals are the conscience of society” is that the duty of intellectuals is to seek truth, and their instinct is to make moral judgments on social phenomena according to their own knowledge and reasoning. Although the concept of “intellectuals” still does not have a universally accepted meaning (and perhaps never will), academicians at the very top of a country’s academic pyramid surely count as intellectuals, don’t they? Then a natural question is: are China’s academicians “the conscience of society”?
After careful study, the answer I have reached is that China’s academicians are not only not the conscience of Chinese society, they simply have no social conscience at all. “Social conscience” is different from “the conscience of society”; it refers to a person’s or a group’s sense of responsibility and moral obligation toward society. Without social conscience, of course one cannot become “the conscience of society.” The fact is that for decades, China’s academicians, for their own private interests, have constantly acted against their consciences, deceiving the public and deceiving society. Because of their special status, and society’s blind trust in them, the harm academicians have caused to China’s development has been very serious.
To say that “China’s academicians have no social conscience” may seem like “striking down a whole crowd with one blow.” True, among China’s academicians there are people of high academic level, people of good moral character, and some who have both. But taken as a whole, this is a corrupt institution. To judge whether a group or institution is corrupt, one does not look at what proportion of its members are corrupt, but whether it has a mechanism for survival of the fittest and replacement of the old by the new, whether it has a strict and comprehensive self-supervision mechanism, whether evil suppresses good or good suppresses evil within it, and above all how the group behaves collectively on major issues of right and wrong. In short, one must listen to what it says and watch what it does. By the above standards, China’s academicians simply fail.
The academician system of New China began in 1955, when they were called members of academic divisions. From 1993 on, China’s division members were renamed academicians, and within a few years their number doubled. Correspondingly, the academic and moral level of academicians also declined sharply. (Yi Ming: The Evolution of China’s Academician System). This series of articles is divided into three parts, and will expose, analyze, and criticize the corrupt Chinese academician system from different angles, tearing away the mysterious veil draped over China’s academicians. The issue of China’s academicians’ academic level is not within the scope of this series. This series discusses only their moral problems.
I. Ten-Thousand-Jin Yield per Mu and Corpses Littering the Land
As early as 1958, in the Great Leap Forward era, Qian Xuesen, then a member of an academic division, was already touting in the newspapers the possibility of “ten-thousand-jin yield per mu.” At the beginning of one article, he quoted a folk rhyme: “The year before last we carried grain for sale with baskets, last year we rocked grain for sale on boats. This year trucks can’t hold it all, next year even trains will seem too small.” At that time some places in Henan had successively “created” records of more than 2,000 jin and 3,530 jin of grain per mu, so Member Qian asked and answered himself: “Has land already reached the top of the amount of grain it can give people? Scientific calculation tells us it is still far from it!” He said that of the solar energy reaching the earth’s surface, if only 30% were utilized, yield per mu could reach “more than 20 times two thousand and some hundred jin!” (Qian Xuesen: How Much Grain Yield per Mu Could There Be?). A year later, his calculations made the yield potential precisely 58,500 jin per mu. (Qian Xuesen: Mechanical Problems in Agriculture). It is said that his articles really did make Mao Zedong believe the falsely reported grain yields from below, and worry about the question, “What should we do if there is too much grain?” (Ding Shu, Human Disaster, chapter 4: Boasting and Launching Wild “Satellites”).
In theory, Qian Xuesen may not have been wrong. If plants could utilize 30% of solar energy, and one fifth of the plant were edible grain, then yields above 50,000 jin per mu would indeed be possible. But in reality, these two “ifs” were obviously impossible, even judging by today’s scientific and technological level. And placed in the years 1958 and 1959, when crisis was already everywhere and starving corpses littered the land, publicly and loudly promoting this “ten-thousand-jin yield per mu” theory was clearly adding fuel to the fire, making things worse, aiding tyranny, and acting as an accomplice. This may be the earliest example of Chinese academicians losing their social conscience.
Mr. Qian Xuesen spent the 1950s making prolonged efforts before finally returning to China from the United States, was elected in 1957 as part of China’s second group of academic division members, and joined the Chinese Communist Party at the end of 1958. Mr. Qian’s purpose in returning to China was nothing other than to serve his motherland, so why did he commit such a low-level error and do something that today seems so foolish? Even a pampered young master who cannot tell the five grains apart should have known how impossible it was to raise average grain yield per mu at that time from several hundred jin to tens of thousands of jin, shouldn’t he? What is more, from “the year before last we carried grain for sale with baskets” suddenly soaring to “this year trucks can’t hold it all,” I’m afraid even children could not be fooled by that. In the article “The Evolution of China’s Academician System,” I once said: “The implementation of political standards in academician elections made academicians appendages of the political system and caused them to lose their social conscience.” Mr. Qian Xuesen suffered under the McCarthy anti-communist hysteria in the United States, and after returning to China personally heard of and witnessed the cruel severity of the Anti-Rightist Movement; these things could not possibly have had no effect on him. Putting personal interests and group interests before the interests of the people and society is the main reason academicians lost their social conscience.
Besides Qian Xuesen, another person who lost his social conscience during the Great Leap Forward was the first-term division member and economist Xue Muqiao. Xue Muqiao had served as director of the State Statistical Bureau and also worked in the Central Finance and Economics Group. He clearly knew the figures reported by officials in various places were false, yet he still instructed his subordinates: “No one can withstand the current wave of the Great Leap Forward, so report it according to the provincial party committee’s opinion.” (Ding Shu, Human Disaster, chapter 4: Boasting and Launching Wild “Satellites”).
The Great Leap Forward caused tens of millions of Chinese civilians to die of hunger. I have no intention here of calculating how many of them were victims of the ten-thousand-jin-yield theory. Looking back today, the essence of the Great Leap Forward was ignorance, and yet the most knowledgeable people in China at the time, namely those division members, did not use their knowledge to shoulder the heavy responsibility of being “the conscience of society.” On the contrary, they used their knowledge and status to intensify this ignorant behavior, making ignorance wear the outer garment of “science.” It should be admitted that in that era, division members who actively cast aside their social conscience were very few. But the overwhelming majority of division members, through silence, passively supported those people who had lost their conscience. Qian Xuesen could have remained silent, but he chose to speak falsehoods. Other division members should have spoken the truth (of course that would have involved risk—otherwise why call it the conscience of society?), but they almost all chose silence. Poor division members, why did you all make the wrong choice?
II. China’s Academicians Beneath the “Gene Queen’s” Skirt
On the afternoon of August 25, 2000, Qiang Boqin, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the National Human Genome Center at Beijing, accepted on behalf of the state a donation from Professor Chen Xiaoning, a Chinese-American scientist praised by the Chinese media as the “Gene Queen,” at the Great Wall Hotel in Beijing. On that same day, Chen Xiaoning was hired as director and professor of the Molecular Cytogenetics Laboratory of the National Human Genome Center at Beijing. (Beijing Evening News, August 28, 2000). It was said that Chen Xiaoning’s donation was a one-of-a-kind human gene clone library in the world, of value impossible to estimate for the time being. Before that, major Chinese media had all devoted a great deal of space to introducing this Chen Xiaoning. According to an article in Beijing Youth Daily: “Last night at 10:30, when Professor Chen Xiaoning, just back from the United States, carefully placed plates of living genes one by one into a minus-86-degree freezer, it marked that our country had become, after the United States, another nation to master top-level gene technology.” (Tao Junfeng: Three Major Gene Libraries Successfully Transported Back to China Yesterday). On July 8 and July 15, Beijing Television’s China Talent Report program said: “According to rough estimates by certain informed persons, her (Chen Xiaoning’s) personal worth is now as high as 500 million yuan.” These “informed persons” included famous Chinese professors and academicians.
However, this farce came to an abrupt end not long after it began. Fang Zhouzi, living in California in the United States, had never heard that nearby UCLA had such a Chinese “Gene Queen,” so his curiosity was aroused, and as a result the Chinese people were shown an unprecedented fraud in the history of Chinese science. To make a long story short, this “Gene Queen” was actually a lab technician at an American university, and the “world’s one-of-a-kind, immeasurably valuable gene libraries” she brought back could in fact be bought on the American market for a few thousand dollars. The real purpose of Chen Xiaoning’s donation was to create momentum for her own company so it could enter the Hong Kong stock market. An open letter drafted by Fang Zhouzi immediately exposed this sham. (Fang Zhouzi et al.: Open Letter on the “Chen Xiaoning Brought Back Three Major Gene Libraries” Incident).
The question is: when this farce was being grandly staged in Chinese newspapers and on television, what were China’s academicians doing? The Chinese people support more than a thousand academicians—how is it that when a foreign scientific fraudster was wildly deceiving the Chinese people, it took a righteous man living abroad to expose the fraud? If China’s academicians could not see through the fraud, then their academic level was too low; if they saw through it but kept silent, then their moral level was too low. Whichever is true, China’s academicians are unfit to be academicians.
In fact, China’s academicians were far more than silent; some of them actually became drummers and billboards for this ugly farce. Academician Qiang Boqin, who “accepted the donation” “on behalf of the state,” also served as chief member of the domestic advisory group for Chen Xiaoning’s “Boning Gene Company,” and listed second was another academician, Wu?. Although Academician Wu? later denied ties with “Boning,” that was long after the ugly show had already been exposed. (Wu?: Statement Regarding the “Promotional Materials of Boning Gene Company”). Other members of Boning’s domestic advisory group included: Professor Jin Li, then dean of the School of Life Sciences at Fudan University; Professor Yang Huanming, then director of the Beijing Genomics Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; doctoral advisor Shen Yan of the National Human Genome Research Center; doctoral advisors Qiu Jingying, Chen Shanshan, and Dai Zhuohua of Peking University; doctoral advisors Fang Fude and Cai Youyu of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and so on. (See: Boning Gene Company, founder, advisers, product introduction,
http://xys.org/xys/ebooks/others/sc...nelibrary25.txt). Without Fang Zhouzi, Academician Qiang and Academician Wu might long since have become millionaires, and those professors and doctoral advisors probably would long since have been promoted to academicians. No wonder some people hate Fang Zhouzi so much. How many people’s bright futures he ruined!
By now, the truth has long since become known to the whole world. This was a great humiliation for China’s intellectual world and a grave betrayal of Chinese society by China’s academicians. But did the Chinese Academy of Sciences apologize to the Chinese people? Did China’s academicians examine themselves? Did Academician Qiang Boqin receive any punishment? No. It was as if nothing had happened, and everything was slowly forgotten.
In the 1960s, China had a very famous play called Never Forget. Yes, never forget! If you forget, ugly things will come back again.
III. The World-Shaking “Nucleic Acid Nutrition” Fraud
Almost on the heels of the “Gene Queen” farce, mainland China was suddenly swept by a craze of “eat genes to supplement genes.” Advertisements for nucleic-acid nutritional products bearing the portraits of 38 Nobel Prize winners flooded the major Chinese media. Common people who did not understand the matter pulled out wad after wad of cash as if enchanted, buying expensive various nucleic-acid nutritional products, among which “Zhen-Ao Nucleic Acid” was the hottest, and its sales points spread across the country in an instant. In October 2000, the Ministry of Health held in Qingdao the “2000 International Academic Forum on Health Care for Middle-Aged and Elderly People and China International Health Products Exposition,” and “Zhen-Ao Nucleic Acid Gene Nutrient” won the only gold prize. On January 5, 2001, Guangming Daily published a signed article: “Let Life Nucleic Acids Benefit Humanity—On China’s Famous Gene Scientist, Professor Cui Xiuyun, Doctoral Advisor at Dalian Medical University.” In that interview report, this famous “gene scientist” became so carried away that she actually boasted that the “life nucleic acid” she had “invented” was the very “elixir of immortality” Qin Shi Huang had searched everywhere for.
Anyone who has studied biochemistry to the undergraduate level should know that human food contains four major categories of macromolecular compounds: protein, nucleic acids, fats, and carbohydrates (mainly starch). These compounds must be broken down in the human stomach and intestines into the monomers or small polymers composing them before they can be absorbed and utilized by humans. So although what you eat may be protein, what is absorbed and utilized is amino acids; what you eat may be nucleic acid, but what is absorbed and utilized is nucleosides or nucleotides. Since these four major categories of substances exist in large quantities in ordinary food, and since human cells themselves have biosynthetic ability, as long as one’s diet is normal, almost nobody needs to separately supplement either protein or nucleic acids. A simple analogy: a person may choose to eat rice, or may choose to use physical and chemical methods to divide the rice he wants to eat into protein, nucleic acids, fats, and carbohydrates, and then put them separately into capsules. Should one eat the rice, or swallow the capsules? If one is not ill, the only reason for choosing the latter is ignorance. And anyone who incites others to choose the latter, if not ignorant, is certainly a fraud wanting to profit from it.
The fabricators of the “nucleic acid nutrition” case were precisely such a group of frauds.
On the same day Guangming Daily’s signed article was published, Fang Zhouzi published an article on the New Threads website, “A New Commercial Fraud and a New ‘Gene Queen’,” tearing away the deceptive mask of nucleic-acid nutritional products.
Fang Zhouzi again! Could such a simple scientific fraud really have fooled all the scientists in China? Ordinary professors and doctoral advisors might be fooled, but were even the academicians representing the highest level of Chinese science and technology also fooled? If anyone really thinks so, then that person is the one being fooled. Just one week after Fang Zhouzi fired the first shot, Li Zaiping, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, published “An Open Letter to Guangming Daily,” denying that he had ever praised Cui Xiuyun’s nucleic-acid research. On January 31, Professor Yang Huanming, then secretary-general of China’s major “Human Genome Project,” publicly pointed out that so-called nucleic-acid food was not much different from rice flour in nutritional value. So the academic level of leading figures in China’s intellectual world had not fallen below the undergraduate level after all. They simply lacked the courage to fire the first shot.
However, although the “nucleic acid nutrition” case involved far less knowledge and a much lower academic threshold than the “Gene Queen” case, it was astonishingly difficult to win that battle. This war lasted nearly a year from beginning to end, with both sides going back and forth through several rounds; it truly had many twists and turns. On one side were a few unarmed weak scholars led by Fang Zhouzi, while on the other side stood powerful forces including the Ministry of Health, the Chinese Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and the “China Health Care Science and Technology Society.” Readers should be especially reminded that this Ministry of Health is the same yamen that concealed the epidemic during this year’s SARS storm.
What did China’s academicians do during the “nucleic acid nutrition” war? Lu Jiaxi, academician and former president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who claimed he was “virtually completely ignorant of medicine,” wrote a preface in 1995 for a book advocating nucleic-acid nutrition, Orthomolecular Nucleic Acid and Metabolic Therapy, saying, “I wish orthomolecular medicine and its branch nucleic-acid metabolic therapy comparatively healthy and smooth development in China, vigorous growth, and rapid flowering and fruiting, to benefit the people’s health.” This several-hundred-word preface was taken out and heavily hyped five or six years later by his two students, Yang Bingyuan and Wang Zhongkan, and was widely printed in Chinese newspapers and magazines. Another academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhang Shuzheng, researcher at the Institute of Microbiology, publicly defended “nucleic acid nutrition” at symposiums and hearings. (Fang Zhouzi: My Accusation: Experts in China’s Biochemistry Community Gave False Testimony to the Public). This was the performance of China’s academicians.
By contrast, foreign scientists dared to uphold fairness. On March 1, 2001, Nature published an article commenting on the current state of Chinese science and technology and mentioned China’s “nucleic acid nutrition.” Although the article did not directly criticize “nucleic acid nutrition,” it very clearly implied contempt for it; this can be seen from the title, “China’s hopes and hypes.” . On March 6, Nobel laureate Watson wrote to the New Threads website denying that nucleic acid has a nutritional function. (New Threads: Nobel Laureate Watson Writes to Deny “Nucleic Acid Nutrition”). Three other Nobel laureates—David Baltimore and Paul Berg of the United States, and Werner Arber of Switzerland—also stated on different occasions that nucleic acid has no nutritional value. (Bi Sheng: Nobel Laureates Deny Nucleic Acid Nutrition). On August 10, 2001, the American journal Science published an article by Xinhua reporter Xiong Lei: “CHINA: Biochemist Wages Online War Against Ethical Lapses.” To this point, only then did this battle, which had made Chinese scientists lose face, undergo a fundamental turning point. On August 24, Southern Weekend published an article by Li Hujun and Zhu Pengcheng: “Zou Chenglu: ‘The Nucleic Acid Controversy’ Is Not an Academic Dispute,” the first time a Chinese academician stood on the side of justice in this battle. By then, more than eight months had passed since the war began. In October, the Chinese Biochemical Society established a “house rule”: “Scholars may not act as ‘plants’ for merchants.” (Xue Hui: Scholars May Not Act as “Plants” for Merchants).
Although nucleic-acid nutritional products have not yet completely disappeared in China, they can be said to be barely clinging to life. Looking back now, if Fang Zhouzi had not started the fight and if foreign volunteer troops had not joined the battle, China’s common people might still be being deceived to this day, while those scientific fraudsters would have become world-class millionaires. The Chinese have supported more than a thousand academicians of the two academies, yet in the end it was scientists abroad who had to serve as the conscience of Chinese society. Where did the social conscience of Chinese scientists themselves go?
IV. Summary
In the Chinese primer classic Three Character Classic there are lines such as: “Dogs guard the night, chickens announce the dawn,” and “Silkworms spin silk, bees make honey.” The meaning is that every kind of living thing in this world has its own function and duty. In human society, when a nation is invaded by foreign enemies, soldiers have an inescapable duty to rush to the front and defend home and country. When a community unfortunately catches fire, firefighters must also struggle to save the victims’ lives and property. Failure to do these things is dereliction of duty; in lighter cases one is dismissed, in serious cases punished by law.
In human society, the duty of scientists, besides doing their own research in the laboratory, should also include spreading scientific knowledge to society. And the duty of academicians is to represent the scientific community and make their attitude clear on major issues of right and wrong. Yet from the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s to the two major science-related fraud cases of the 21st century, China’s academicians not only did not state their position (or state it in a timely manner), did not stand on the side of justice (or stand there in a timely manner), and did not protect the interests of society and the people; on the contrary, they participated in these affairs and fanned the flames, turning what were originally very stupid and simple tricks into things tangled and unfathomable.
Why is scientific fraud so prevalent in China? Because it keeps succeeding.
Why do scientific frauds so easily succeed in China? Because China’s academicians have no social conscience!
When one sees injustice on the road, one draws one’s sword to help; one acts bravely for a just cause, helping the weak and aiding the poor—are these not the basic morals scientists should have? Even taking ten thousand steps back, a person should at least know how to repay gratitude, shouldn’t he? Even the scholar-officials of China’s feudal society knew that since they received salary from the imperial court, they should be loyal to it. In 2000, in response to some people exploiting the momentum of the Human Genome Project to hype “nucleic-acid nutritional products,” Francis Collins, head of the American Human Genome Project, publicly came forward to denounce these commercial schemes and called on American scientists to leave their laboratories and spread knowledge about genes to the public.
(http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,36328,00.html). In Europe and America, the main reason pseudoscience cannot stand firm is that scientists, guided by their consciences, dare and are willing to step forward and state their positions. But look at China’s academicians: they enjoy the supreme honor given by the people, and enjoy treatment that only a very few senior officials can receive, yet not only do they fail to find ways to repay the people and serve them, when the people are harmed by scientific fraudsters they feign deafness and dumbness, and even take part and profit from it. I cannot help but ask: academicians, where is your conscience?
Note: Chinese Academy of Sciences academicians Zou Chenglu, He Zuoxiu, and others have made unremitting efforts in opposing pseudoscience in China, and I express my respect for their character and contributions. Regrettably, they are only a very small minority among China’s academicians, and their actions are only individual actions.
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大功告成，打个Kiss!
大功告成，打个Kiss!
