Saturday, March 1, 2008

Hub of Fraud

While Korea failed to make the top 50 financial hubs, one area it does excel in is bogus research papers. KAIST has recently suspended its 'star' Kim Tae-Kook for falsifying research data on two papers published in leading international journals (including Science, again, which already got a black eye from the Hwang Woo-suk scandal a few years back).

Kim's 2006 paper suggested ideas for increasing the human lifespan by ``reprogramming'' cells ― the research earned him much publicity. South Korea's President Roh Moo-hyun invited him to the Blue House and KAIST President Suh Nam-pyo praised him as one of the most likely Korean candidates to win the Nobel Prize.

There were already complaints that Koreans were having a harder time publishing in international journals after the Hwang scandal. This won't help matters much.

Two major scandals from Korea in the space of a few years. Coincidence? Or just a peak at the systematic corruption that seems to be behind every institution in this country?

6 comments:

kwandongbrian said...

PZ Myers of Pharyngula also investigated an interesting article from an Inje Professor (Busan?).

Here is the link
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula
/2008/02/a_baffling_failure_of_peer_rev.php

I broke the link so you'll have to put it in Wordpad or something and put it together (I'm a jerk that way I guess, or else long links don't work so well in comments).

Kevin Kim said...

Brian,

You can take long URLs to the site "tinyurl.com" and convert them to something manageable.


Kevin

kwandongbrian said...

It's not my blog; why should I go to all that work?
...and nobody ever linked to him again...

Yeah, I was lazy - I have begun doing that but forgot to this time.

Unknown said...

Hello? Hello? Is this thing on? Can the people in the back hear me?

Anonymous said...

I am soooo close to putting up another post...

Anonymous said...

Just being nice and leaving a comment.. since no one else is.