Incubating Innovation or Cultivating Corruption? The Developmental State and the Life Sciences in Asia

Abstract

A substantial body of literature purports to document the growth of scientific misconduct in Northeast Asia. This article traces the apparent growth of research fraud and falsification to two distinct features of the national innovation systems common to the region: liberal research regimes adopted by developmental states and marked by freedom from government oversight, and illiberal laboratory cultures imported from Germany and marked by all-powerful lab directors and their vulnerable underlings. Based on comparative, qualitative case studies of pioneering countries in bio-medical research, as well as cross-national quantitative analyses of the permissiveness of national stem-cell research policies, we argue that Asia's scientific pathologies are the products of two institutional factors: funding and freedom offered to scientists by developmental states, and the lack of informal control prevalent in the German model of higher education. We conclude that, while Northeast Asian officials offer their biomedical researchers funding and freedom to take advantage of opportunities that rarely exist in the West, their scientists stifle open debate and criticism, and thereby hinder the growth of informal as well as formal control mechanisms that are critical for deterring and detecting scientific fraud.