Commentary

Aftermath of Hwang-Gate II

Mike Weisbart
Korea Times Columnist
The Korea Times

In some ways, it just doesn't matter what new details emerge from the Hwang Woo-suk debacle. Sure, everyone wants _ and deserves _ to know the full truth about what happened and how. But as the media slavers breathlessly, waiting on every twist and turn to bring you the latest developments, I think it’s time for some sober reflection from a different perspective.

The easiest, most accessible analysis, and the one that most foreigners who know a bit about Korea are pointing out en masse, is that Koreans’ penchant for doing things fast has finally caught up and bit them in their backside. One of my favorite blogs, The Marmot’s Hole, was filled last weekend with comments from people on this subject. You see similar comments in international media reports as well. Almost anything published over the weekend had a quote from some US-based scientist pointing out that Korea lacks the institutional safeguards to ensure this kind of research is conducted in an upright manner.

But there is something far more insidious about this fiasco, something much more troubling, something that every Korean ought to stop and think long and hard about. And it’s bigger than just the ``trust betrayed’’ and ``Korea’s shame’’ stories currently working their way through the nation’s op/ed pages. Not to belittle those too much, though, because its definitely going to be a long, long time before Science, Nature, or any other international scientific journal for that matter, accepts a paper from a Korean scientist without wondering first whether the Korean has fabricated something. And that’s sad.

But I wonder how Koreans themselves will get over this whole thing, what they will learn. More to the point, what capacity do they have to learn? I ask this question because, as this story has broken, so many Koreans seemed blind to reality and their reactions were disconcerting to watch.

The meltdown began with simple suspicions about ethics violations. But the response from most Koreans _ though not all _ was a non-thinking, knee jerk effort to protect their national treasure. First there was the move to paint western scientific ethics rules as quaint in this day and age of endless and speedy transformation. Then there were the efforts to tar and feather the foreign scientist, Gerald Schatten, as a man who only sought fame and glory from the great Korean scientists before running off with Korea’s patents and Nobel Prize. Then of course there was the ostracism of the MBC TV people, who dared to raise a question about whether the national hero had done something wrong.

Throughout it all, the country defended its man. Of course there were dissenters, but they were beaten back by a nationalistic bloodthirsty press and a crazed public. The editorials of the major newspapers excoriated MBC’s PD Diary for daring to bash Hwang. Advertisers pulled their ads from the formerly respected news program. People protested and women donated eggs, with many people likening the egg drive to the ’97 financial crisis when patriots donated their gold trinkets to bail out the country.

Korea has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. The overwhelming majority of people finish high school and continue on to some form of post-secondary school. There are stories in the paper these days about how workers are overeducated for their jobs. And yet, initial public reaction to the nightmare was so docile, so uneducated, so pathetic.

How else can we explain those women who stood up to hand over their eggs to strangers even after it was clear that something inappropriate and underhanded had occurred. Talk about a Brave New World. Sure, some of them hoped for cures to disease, but most of them were just answering the call, doing their patriotic duty.

About two weeks ago, a feminist was quoted in the International Herald Tribune as saying that ‘‘the campaign to collect eggs is grotesque and bizarre.’’ Can you think of better adjectives? The egg campaign was like something out of a science fiction novel. Even with all the dark clouds and uncertainty swirling overhead, the women, with flowers in hand and tears streaming down their faces, came to give a part of their bodies that could potentially be used someday by someone they’ll never know to reproduce them in exact duplicate. They didn’t seem to care that they didn’t really know what would happen to their eggs, or how they would be used after they had been harvested.

Brainwashed is not the right word to describe what has happened because the people who followed Dr. Hwang blindly have been conditioned to do so since birth. Even with all their education, national sentiment is still more powerful than logical reasoning. And this is why I worry that some Koreans don’t have the capacity to learn from this experience.

But learn they must because there is a price to pay for excessive nationalism and if anyone thinks that the cost can’t be higher than national embarrassment in the face of such a scandal, they are sadly mistaken and ignorant of history.

Incidentally, I wonder if Korean Air will still offer the doctor free tickets.