Hao Bolin Criticizes CAS Leadership on Ethics

A renown and outspoken theoretical physicist Hao Bolin (郝柏林) has published a speech in his own blog criticizing a leadership figure in Chinese Academy of Science for unethical behavior. According to his note, the speech was prepared for a meeting of the Committee for the Construction of Scientific Ethics (科学道德建设委员会) of the CAS. The meeting was held in early November. Hao was not able to attend himself but submitted his speech in written form. He later learned that the Committee had decided that his speech "deserves much further study" and was not published during or after the meeting.

Since two months have past and his speech was still "under study", Hao decided to publish it on his own in his Blog. You can also see the speech (in Chinese) at New Thread.

In the speech, Hao made it clear that he was not satisfied with the previous investigation work on ethics which, in his opinion, had only touched "small flies", while unethical behavior came from the very top of the CAS leadership. He singled out the practice of officers signing their names on research papers that they had not contributed or even read.

"The higher an officer's rank is, the more papers he publishes per year. That is a general phenomenon today," lamented Hao in the speech. To prove his point, he listed the number of papers apparently authored by a top leader of the CAS from 1985 to 2004. It showed a steady uptrend, coinciding to the author's rise in the ranks of CAS leadership. During 2003, the latest year Hao has the complete data, the author published 51 papers in SCI journals, approximately one per week!

Although Hao did not mention the leader by name, Fang Zhouzi revealed that Hao's target is Bai Chunli (白春礼), a physical chemist and Vice President of the CAS.