So one of my students raised, in a smaller-group discussion in class, the idea that Dr. Hwang Woo-Seok was defrauded by Americans who stole his work–scientific espionage!–and then sent fake results under his name to Nature.
What kills me is that, when I replied that it’s unlikely, and that nobody in the scientific establishment seems to think this is what happened, including his former employers, she said, “But you don’t know that’s not what happened.” Other students quietly watched this and didn’t seem to disagree, at least not aloud, as I replied, “Well, you don’t know whether I know or not, but everything else in Hwang’s behaviour suggests that it was he, not some unknown Americans, who did the wrong thing. Don’t you think a theft would be all over the Korean news?” She clung to “You never know…” There’s absolutely nothing about the Hwang case that suggests anything except the fact that the guy was a nutter, a megalomaniac and a fraud. This desperate desire to cling to his good name just depresses me, because it bodes poorly for popular understanding of science. Worse, it makes me wonder what will happen when science overturns some theory or other created by a Korean. Will the masses refuse to accept the evidence that falsifies this theory, the way fundamentalist Christians ignore the evidence for evolution? And here I was thinking that Korea’s Christian sects, less obsessed with the “wickedness of biotech” than their American counterparts, were a boon… but blind nationalism is there to even things out.
And this was in an exercise in which students were supposed to pitch ideas for movies or documentaries on negative issues in Korean history — negative things done by Koreans to other Koreans, or to other peoples, comparable to the film we were discussing, Rabbit Proof Fence. I explicitly asked for the films not to be about the victimization of Korea, but about negative actions of Koreans — to get them to consider the idea of making a documentary that’s not a depiction of their nation in a victim position, but realistically in the position of oppressor, whether of a class or group of citizens, or whatever.
Then again, another student in another group said something quite reassuring about the Comfort Women issue — she pitched a film decrying the government’s treatment of these women and ignoring their plight when normalizing relations with Japan, and criticizing other Korean players in the story. They weren’t quite sure how to make a feasible film out of it, though one group member, surprisingly, suggested a musical could make it work for a popular audience.
The best pitch of the class was from a guy who wanted to make a movie about the 3S Policy of the Park dictatorship — when Sports, Screen (movies), and Sex were used as a distraction to depoliticize the masses and let the dictatorship continue untrammeled by protest. He suggested the best way to dramatize this would be to make a comedy about a baseball star who hits it big in the pre-3S era, and then, when the policy comes into effect, and the newly exploded sports industry involves a flood of new players, he is no longer a big fish in a small pond, and he loses his fame and becomes a nothing, a nobody. I told him that he really should write up that script, that I would pay money to see it, and that I thought other people would, too. IT’s a great idea for a script.