A Rather Muddled Take on China’s Scientific Prowess

In today’s Washington Post (Page A1, no less) you can find a significant number of column inches dedicated to the rise of China as a scientific producer of note.  As I suspect this article could get some play in science advocacy and debates over economic competitiveness, I’ve read it a few times, closely.  I find it a bit of a puzzle, because it manages to hint at a lot more than it explains.  That the headline fails to note the complexity of the issue, which the article tries to express, is no surprise.  Where things fall short is in the lack of a consistent theme to the piece and in the continued emphasis on the quantitative in assessing scientific output.

I do not mean to say that China is not a growing scientific superpower.  Certainly in terms of output metrics it is rising.  But measures like the number of patents generated, the number of people employed in research, and the research and development spending as a percentage of gross national product speak primarily to amount of research, and not quality.  Unfortunately, while the article takes the space to at least note the questions people have about the quality of Chinese research (and the serious concerns about the ethical conduct of Chinese scientists), it doesn’t present them with the same weight or interest as the concerns over rising output.  It reads as though the reporter doesn’t think the negatives about Chinese scientific activity matter, when it’s probably closer to the truth that some Chinese researchers don’t think the negatives matter (or that they’re really a positive, a freedom to do what you want).

Perhaps the best example is the case where the same 17 year old researcher is going to compare the genes of one thousand top-performing Chinese students with one thousand ‘normal kids.’  Putting aside human subjects research issues (which the Chinese may well do), it’s hard for me not to think that such a genetic comparison will lead to the kind of genetic determinism that 10 years of human genome research have suggested is unrealistic.  Our genes are much more complicated than we imagined, and how those genes develop (in conjunction with outside influence) is more complicated than we imagined as well.  I don’t expect a 17 year old to have the wisdom to recognize this, wherever they’re from.  It would be nice to have seen some wisdom in the organization of this article, but I haven’t found it yet.