《科学》发现事实：王中林承认用全在美国做的研究冒充北大成果

2006年4月，北大新闻办发布新闻，说北大教授王中林在《科学》发表论文。他发表在《科学》论文，上面不仅列了乔治亚工学院，而且列了北大和国家纳米科学和技术中心。
而他现在正式向《科学》承认，全部工作都是在乔治亚工学院做的。

Zhong Lin Wang, a nanotechnology researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, has three affiliations on recent papers in Science: Georgia Tech, Beida, and the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology in Beijing. Wang is part-time director at both Chinese institutions, which hailed his publications on their Web sites. Wang acknowledges that the work was done solely at Georgia Tech.

http://www.sciencemag.org/xxxx/content/full/313/5794/1721?rss=1

Frustrations Mount Over China's High-Priced Hunt for Trophy Professors

Hao Xin*

Chinese universities bask in the glow of top-gun scientists hired on part-time deals to share their wisdom. Critics say the money could be spent more wisely
Mathematician Gang Tian did not expect a standing-room-only crowd last week when he gave a lecture at Beijing University (Beida) on the Poincaré conjecture. But not all were there for the math. Reporters and others had come for a glimpse of the man at the center of a tempest engulfing Chinese academia. Tian is a premier example of a controversial phenomenon: a Chinese-born researcher with a full-time faculty position overseas who gets paid handsomely for short working stints in his homeland.

Resentment against part-timers boiled over last July, when Shing-Tung Yau, a Harvard University mathematician and Tian's xxxxer mentor, dismissed the "majority" of Beida's overseas recruits as "jiade," or "fakes," in comments in the Chinese magazine Nanfang Renwu Zhoukan. Beida officials fired off a series of rebuttals in which they termed Yau's remarks "irresponsible" and a "distortion of facts" and rattled off achievements--papers in prestigious journals and patents, for instance--by talent returned from overseas.

The university's attempts at damage control, however, only intensified debate about professors such as Tian, who has been listed among Beida's full-time faculty for several years. Beida nominated Tian to membership in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), an honor reserved for scientists who expend at least half their effort in China. Thanks to Beida's backing, Tian--who was then also listed as a full-time professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)--was elected in 2001 by a margin of one vote. Last spring, Tian left MIT to become a full-time professor at Princeton University.

After the Poincaré lecture, reporters pressed Tian about his employment status in China. He said that he now spends more than 4 months a year at Beida and "hopes to be a full-time professor later on," perhaps after Beida builds a $13 million international institute of mathematics, which Tian will direct.

Some proponents consider part-time academic appointments a critical means of stanching China's loss of scientific talent. Universities and government agencies are boosting quotas for part-timers and upping the ante to entice more top guns to return. Several universities have created "million-yuan professorships" with stratospheric--for China--annual salaries equivalent to $125,000. Most returnees are midcareer scientists who accept more modest offers (see sidebar on p. 1722).

Critics, however, contend that part-timers often are less important as professors than as tools in the battle for prestige and resources. Yau claims that researchers who parachute in can hardly contribute in a substantive way to China's scientific development. But the trend seems almost unstoppable, says Shigang He, a neuroscientist currently at CAS's Institute of Biophysics in Beijing: "I don't think universities will really seriously control this, because they benefit."

Figure 1 A call for oversight. Shigang He thinks China's funding agencies should hold part-time professors to their contractual commitments.

CREDIT: COURTESY OF SHIGANG HE

Offers too good to refuse?
Overseas academics began returning to China in the late 1990s, drawn by programs to woo talented scientists back (Science, 21 January 2000, p. 417). The Ministry of Education's Changjiang Scholars Program and CAS's One-Hundred-Talent Plan intended initially to recruit people to work at least 9 months a year--essentially full-time--in China. But top-notch researchers who signed up wanted to help their homeland and keep their jobs overseas: "If you have a tenured professorship [in the United States], it does not make sense to give up the position," says Jun Liu, a statistician at Harvard.

The education ministry quickly took a new tack, creating a category of part-time Changjiang scholars: jiangzuo, or lecture chairs, for associate professors or higher. They are required to spend no fewer than 3 months--or two, "under special circumstances"--in China. But universities eager to attract stars are willing to make exceptions. Ying Xu, a bioinxxxxatics researcher at the University of Georgia, Athens, says he turned down a couple of invitations to apply for a jiangzuo post, citing time constraints. University officials have told him that a 3-month commitment could be met by arriving at the end of the first month and leaving at the beginning of the third--but Xu says "his conscience did not allow" him to play that game. (Such overtures, other scientists say, are typical.) Xu chose instead to organize a weeklong symposium in China each summer.

Other part-timers say they are unaware of a time requirement. Liu accepted a jiangzuo post at Beida in 2002, but he acknowledges that he spends only about 1 month a year in China. Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate in economics at the University of Chicago in Illinois who recently joined Beida as a Changjiang jiangzuo, says, "What I will do is not precise; it will be mainly up to me."

Incentive programs have stirred controversy before. CAS began a crackdown after an open letter in 2003 publicized one extreme case of a full-time researcher then at the University of Wisconsin who held grants from three programs and fulfilled a pair of 9-month and one 6-month commitments concurrently. According to CAS's Li Hefeng, the academy so far has canceled the awards of 166 recipients (out of 1005 overseas recruits) and demanded the money back.

Despite allegations that the system is rife with cheating, universities covet part-timers and have lobbied for an expansion of the programs. In 2004, the education ministry raised its annual quota of jiangzuo from 10 to 100. Last year, Beida for the first time appointed more Changjiang part-time (11) than full-time professors (10). Many universities have set up their own programs for illustrious part-timers--"Nobel laureates" and "internationally famous scholars," as Zhejiang University's announcement puts it. Whereas Zhejiang is still hoping to snare a Nobel laureate, Beida, in rebutting Yau, touted three among its jiangzuo ranks: "One can well imagine their contributions to education and research," the university stated.

A fair compromise?
Many academics feel that the prestige that comes with hiring part-timers is superficial. "Some high-profile papers appear to come from China, even though the science didn't really take root [there]," says Mu-Ming Poo, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Chinese universities turn a blind eye to absentee professors as long as they list their Chinese affiliation on papers, adds He.

Tepin (full-time: 9 months) Jiangzuo (part-time: 2-3 months)
University 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
Beijing 6 8 9 15 9 11 10 3 4 3 1 1 8 11
Qinghua 5 14 6 10 4 7 7 0 3 1 4 1 7 9
Fudan 6 7 3 4 5 7 8 1 1 0 0 1 5 6
Nanjing 2 6 3 8 5 6 4 0 0 0 0 1 5 2
Zhejiang 2 2 3 9 7 4 6 1 1 0 0 0 3 0
Shanghai Jiao Tong 3 5 7 7 1 4 4 1 0 0 0 0 2 6
(all universities) 66 112 97 135 84 111 101 6 10 10 7 10 79 89
Buying spree. Top Chinese universities are sharply increasing their ranks of part-time researchers from overseas, even as numbers of full-time returnees hold steady.

CREDIT: SOURCE: MINISTRY OF EDUCATION

Indeed, the number of publications with Chinese authors listing multiple affiliations is on the rise. For example, Zhong Lin Wang, a nanotechnology researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, has three affiliations on recent papers in Science: Georgia Tech, Beida, and the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology in Beijing. Wang is part-time director at both Chinese institutions, which hailed his publications on their Web sites. Wang acknowledges that the work was done solely at Georgia Tech. Similar cases abound.

At the same time, some part-timers downplay their moonlighting. Zhensu She, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, lists in his CV on UCLA's Web site his full-time Changjiang professorship at Beida as an "award" in 1999--it was a 5-year contract--and does not mention that he is director of the Key State Laboratory of Turbulence and Complex Systems and deputy director of the Center of Theoretical Biology, both at Beida.

UCLA policy states that "compensated teaching or research at another institution while employed as a full-time faculty member" requires "prior written approval of only the Chancellor or xxxxutive Vice Chancellor." As Science went to press, UCLA had not clarified whether She or seven other faculty members with similar positions in China obtained such approval. She did not respond to requests for an interview; a source in UCLA's math department says he is on sabbatical.

Teaming up--or outsourcing?
To many Chinese scientists, the bottom line is not how much time is spent on Chinese soil but whether one contributes to the country's science. Poo helped create the Institute of Neuroscience (ION) in Shanghai in 1999 and since then has been its part-time director. He views his role as enabling young Chinese scientists to gain international recognition based on their own projects and publications. Although Poo spent about 80 days in Shanghai last year, and ION covers his expenses, he does not receive an ION salary. "I do not have any problems with people like Mu-Ming Poo," says He. "He is really dedicated, working hard, and doing a good job."

But critics maintain that part-timers such as Poo are rare; many appear to leverage their own projects by taking advantage of China's abundant student labor. In the late 1990s, Xingwang Deng, a molecular biologist at Yale University, proposed using Beida's "human resources" to search for all the genes of the model plant Arabidopsis. The idea appealed to Gu Xiaocheng, a senior biologist, and Chen Zhangliang, then a Beida vice president; the university provided lab space and seed funds. At Yale, Deng taught a young Beida scientist, Qu Li-jia, how to make Arabidopsis mutants.

For his efforts, Deng was appointed a 9-month Changjiang professor by Beida, although he made clear he could not work full-time in China. To reconcile his commitments to Yale and Beida, Deng came up with a "win-win solution," says Gu: Deng persuaded Yale and Beida to establish the Peking-Yale Joint Center for Plant Molecular Genetics and Agro-biotechnology. Under Deng's directorship, the center has been generating data for the Arabidopsis Mutants Database and papers, most of which list Deng as senior author.

Figure 2 Provocateur. Tempers flared after Harvard's Shing-Tung Yau asserted that the majority of Beijing University's overseas recruits are "fakes."

CREDIT: CONAN LEUNG

Given China's "low level" of science, Gu says, this kind of arrangement can be beneficial. "You may call it outsourcing," she says, but the resulting exchanges might not have happened otherwise. Qu adds that before the Peking-Yale Center was set up, "we did not even know how to grow Arabidopsis, but now seven labs at Beida do related work."

Other part-timers are following Deng's example. In 2002, Tian Xu, a Howard Hughes Investigator at Yale and a Changjiang jiangzuo at Fudan University in Shanghai, created the Fudan-Yale Biomedical Research Center, which now employs 20 grad students, one postdoc, and more than 40 staff to screen for genes in fruit flies and mice. And UCLA's Shuo Lin, a Changjiang jiangzuo at Beida since 2004, has retained a dozen grad students there to trawl for zebrafish genes.

With these successes, China seems unlikely to wean itself of its part-timer dependence anytime soon. CAS is even spawning a new breed: "innovation teams" including five or six senior academics from abroad who will take turns spending a year in China and share a pot of $750,000 for research.

But Yau and other critics insist that the popularity of these programs does not justify the expense. Rather than lavish money on part-time academics, they argue, Chinese institutions should raise stipends of students and young researchers from their present paltry levels of $30 to $160 a month. "The Chinese government does not pay enough attention to young people," Yau says. As long as the brightest young minds seek greener pastures outside China, the brain drain--and the hunger for overseas talents--will continue.

With reporting by Dennis Normile.