FROM The New York Post:

An Iowa State University professor resigned after admitting he falsely claimed rabbit blood could be turned into a vaccine for the AIDS virus.

Dr. Dong-Pyou Han spiked a clinical test sample with healthy human blood to make it appear that the rabbit serum produced disease-fighting antibodies, officials said.

The bogus findings helped Han’s team obtain $19 million in research grants from the National Institutes of Health, said James Bradac, who oversees the institutes’ AIDS research. [cont.]

Anti-Globalist Expatriate writes:

Note that plagiarism and outright faking of ‘scientific’ experimental data and results is common in Asia, especially China. When one reads that China is producing record numbers of theses, dissertations, patents, inventions, etc., one should keep in mind that the vast majority of them are faked, plagiarized, or both.

Of course, the immigration status of the ‘Dr.’ in question, and that of his supervisor, aren’t explicitly noted in any of the news articles on this incident.

— Comments —

Adam writes:

On the subject of widespread academic and scientific fraud by Asians, when I was a physics PhD student at a public university, my officemate in the cubicle behind mine was a student from China. I began to notice a stream of students coming into our office to meet with him, which was odd because he no longer held a position as a teaching assistant. Most of the students who came to see him were Muslims from the Middle East. He said that these students were paying him to tutor them. I saw him working on many homework assignments, lab reports, and even online exams in subjects that I knew he was not enrolled in. I also saw in his notebook (he didn’t make even the slightest effort to conceal what he was doing) a list of students names (all Muslim names) and computer account logins and passwords; students gave him their account information so that he could log into their course websites and submit coursework on their behalf.

I confronted him about all this a few times, and he admitted to me that he was completing homework, lab reports, and exams for the students who came to him for “tutoring.” When I told him that I didn’t agree with what he was doing, he brushed it off and said that he “had no choice” since the department was no longer supporting him with a position as a research or teaching assistant. I knew he was nominally Christian and attended some sort of protestant congregation of Chinese students, and I tried to appeal to Christian morality by asking him what his religious beliefs had to say about lying and fraud. In his broken English, he replied something to the effect of, “Nothing. In church they just try to teach you how to be happy.”

It really bothered me that these foreign students — many of them from places such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar — were either unable or unwilling to do their own coursework, and were paying my corrupt Chinese officemate to do their work for them. Many of these students were engineering undergraduates. It bothered me that they might very well fraudulently obtain their engineering degrees by paying someone else to do all the intellectual heavy lifting. I wanted to report what was going on, but was afraid of possible repercussions since I still had to share an office with this cheat for the foreseeable future.

When I completed my dissertation and graduated, I told my former PhD advisor about what the Chinese student was doing. My advisor told me that he would discuss it with the Chinese student’s advisor, and that the matter would probably be referred to the department head, who would most likely do nothing about it without physical proof. I tried to enlist the help of my Indian-American officemate as an additional witness to back up the truth of my accusations against the Chinese student, but the Indian-American student refused to get involved. He felt sorry for the Chinese student because he didn’t have any other source of income besides taking money to do coursework for other students.

Later, I found out that the Chinese student’s advisor and dissertation committee did not allow him to defend his thesis. In a private conversation with his former advisor at a social gathering, I found out the reason why: the Chinese student had fabricated his dissertation through extensive plagiarism of published text and figures. Even this was not enough to get him kicked out of the university! His committee gave him a chance to rewrite his dissertation. Still, he was sunk because his advisor refused to work with him any longer, and no other professor wanted to take him on as a student. While he was searching for another advisor, he took a seminar class and plagiarized figures in an end-of-term project. The instructor called him out on it, but the student refused to admit that he had plagiarized the figures even though the evidence was incontrovertible. The instructor convinced the department’s graduate committee to have the student kicked out of the graduate program. Unbelievably, the student successfully appealed to the next higher level in the bureaucracy, and he wasn’t kicked out. The only reason this Chinese student is not still at the university committing further fraud is that his student visa expired and he had to return to China to renew it, but the department refused to help him renew his visa. I think that was their way of getting rid of him.

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