Explaining the Hwang Scandal: National Scientific Culture and its Global Relevance

The cloning scandal around South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk—who had forged scientific data and taken donor eggs from his PhD student—has often been explained by stereotyped models of cultural difference. As two national features which partly account for the scandal, knowledge acquisition in South Korea has close connections to hierarchies of status and prestige; and the life sciences there have a technological approach focused on applications. Similarly, the South Korean work ethos imposes a severe workload on junior researchers. Combined with expectations of self-sacrifice, this scientific culture mobilizes people as resources for scientific experiments and deters any criticism. Although such national features influence research practices in South Korea, they have global relevance. Actors do not merely conform to hegemonic authority structures; rather, they use various tactics to incorporate, appropriate, and twist the cultural ‘rules of the game’. The Hwang scandal resulted from such interactions between actors, strategies, knowledges and narratives. Thus the scandal has general features that increasingly arise beyond South Korea, especially as science worldwide faces greater competitive pressures. National cultural differences should be seen as a resource for understanding how similar problems arise, albeit in apparently different ways.