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Antti on Dr. Hwang’s Evil Buddies

So Antti’s got a post up on the PD Memo team’s having received prssure from the government not to out the fact that Dr. Hwang was a lying bullshitting son of a —–. Because, what, it might be embarrassing to Korea?

Yeah, covering this kind of thing up is even more embarrassing, because the truth often comes out. So if politics can interfere even in what science news gets published, what discipline is safe? It’s hard to trust academia in a country where the government is censoring the very mechanisms by which bad, fake, dishonest science is outed and discredited. It just bodes extremely badly for the country, and for another thing, it suggests that investment in the country’s scientific research is a very bad idea.

Which is what needs to get said publicly, so that things change. It seems to me the risk of losing foreign investment is one of the most frightening prospects of public shame to my students, who bring it up time and time again in their essays calling for this or that change.

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