Yellow Funding Proposals

Some South Korean stem-cell research guru has been outed as a fraud.

SEOUL -- South Korean investigators said yesterday that the apparent landmark stem-cell research by cloning expert Hwang Woo-suk had been faked, turning the onetime national hero into a disgraced fabricator.

The story itself is not what is of interest to me. Just so it's out there, I agree with stem-cell research, so I find it kind of disappointing that someone would mess with data like this. What came to my mind while reading this was simply how much faith we put into "experts." I tend to believe a doctor when he's talking about something related to his field of expertise as I'm sure most people do. One brand of science I don't buy 100% is the theory of global warming. There is evidence of it, however the actual cause is still very much unknown, and research needs to be done on it. But what happens next is a bunch of scientists in a big pissing contest over who gets the grant money to do that research. Then stuff like this happens. Here's another bit of the article...

The government had showered Dr. Hwang with honours and research funds estimated at about $40-million (U.S.).

It opened a state research hub in October, meant to serve as the heart of global medical efforts to find cures for diseases now considered incurable.

So, whoever can cook up the most impressive proposal gets the money (in this case fraudulantly), and that's why we have all these sensationalized "George Bush personally caused global warming with Karl Rove's weather machine" theories. I'm not saying that all global warming scientists are liars. Far from it. I'm just saying that you have to remember that global warming (or global climate change, as they call it now, because the Earth doesn't seem to be warming up, but we had an active hurricane season) is still just a theory, with holes. Don't bet the farm on its cause or even its existence just yet.

Update: I was just going through my blog, and thought I'd mention something about the above blog post. In the past, I've been overly critical about global warming. It exists, but scientists say humans contribute to about 20% of it. The rest is natural. The bottom line is that no matter what Al Gore is super serial about, global warming is not a crisis. I completely agree that something should be done about pollution, primarily for health reasons, but Al Gore is still a tool, and, no, I'm never going to watch "An Inconvenient Truth."