Slashdot Mirror
S. Korea Cloning Success Faked?
minus_273 writes "The BBC is reporting that it appears that the human cloning in Korea might have been faked." From the article: "At least nine of 11 stem cell colonies used in a landmark research paper by Dr Hwang Woo-suk were faked, said Roh Sung-il, who collaborated on the paper. Dr Hwang has agreed to ask the US journal Science to withdraw his paper on stem cell cloning, Mr Roh said ... Last month, Dr Hwang resigned from his main post as head of the World Stem Cell Hub, after it emerged that some of the eggs used in his research were donated by his staff - in contravention of international guidelines. Now it is some of the research itself which is being called into question."
How do you tell the FAKE clones apart from the REAL clones? Dont they all look alike???
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I'm beginning to question whether Korea even really exists..
Oh the (cloned) humanity of it all..
The cloning has not been proven 'fake' yet. I think it is only some of the 'morality' of the experiment that could be called into question so far.
Personally I see no real moral problems with stem cell research, but then I am a complete amoral bastard.
How exactly does one fake a colony of cells? A bit of moldy cheese? Take one stem cell colony and just replicate it?
I assume the controvercy is that they didn't have the degree of success they claimed (plus dishonesty in scientific study is generally frowned upon).
It's only on Slashdot that you see "S. Korea Cloning Success Faked" as the headline instead of, "S. Korea Cloning Success Possibly Faked".
They're going to go and redo all the experiments. All the stem-cell researchers want this, they don't want idiotic media speculation deciding the outcome.
What happened to this postm l?tid=126&tid=95&tid=146
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/12/15/1437218.sht
when someone asks "Woo-suk" in Korea, the answer is going to be "Dr Hwang"
"Oh give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With the Y chromosome changed to X.
And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We'll think of nothing but sex."
Come on guys, Kim Jung Il is a nice guy. He wouldn't lie to us like that!
or is it just deja vu all over again?
...because you never know who you're dealing with.
This will be used as a strawman for any of the arguments against them. "OMFG, they used their own eggs, that is teh bad, everyone says so!" Whether or not this "international guideline" is reasonable, of course, is moot. Whether they faked it or not will eventually become moot. The "immoral" aspects of using your own eggs will be blown totally out of proportion to its real impact on the process, its validity, and its methods.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
If you had a non-profanity laced version of this, I'd love to send it to my religious relatives.
*elevator music plays*
Put together by an automatic script, unfortunately. Good ranting is hard to come by, it seems. I reccomend Maddox.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Your header says the clone was faked. Your body says it might have been. thousands of people are now confused.
9 out of eleven results altered. Interestingly the scientific press are not interested in having the results verified they are just after blood. Of course there is a good reason for this in that it maintains standards but I would like to know if the two unaltered results are still valid and statistically of importance.
Well I guess it suks to be Dr.Whang right now.
How do you think if one day your super-powerful-bossy woman in your office come out and say, "Could you give me some of your sperms, because I want to dupricate it.". Then months later, a pair of your sperm is on Science journal! Can't you see any amorality?
... no. I ought to stop here.
Is he not sure that the other two were faked?
I am not involved with the research, but I read a report about the submission in Science and this issue of duplicated photos of the cell colonies a few weeks ago. The issue was that Science had asked for better high-res photos at the last minute and a mistake was made on what got sent to them.
They (Science) had already had the submission paper with lower res photos that were (supposedly) clearly different from each other. So while the version of the paper that was printed in Science clearly had duplicate photos representing different colonies, the original version of the paper/photos that Science had was not that way.
I think this is just more sensationalizm to further smear an already hurting scientist.
While it is lamentable that a (likely) fake paper will be a setback for stem cell research, I can't help but see it as a blow for all of the sciences. There have been other instances where top science publications released falsified or outright bogus papers, but I believe that this one stands out by virtue of its controversial subject. Even if the paper was not faked, criticism will come from all sides, with questions ranging from the ethical standards/morality of scientists to the usefulness of the peer review process. Negative attention is the last thing needed by publically controversial research.
And no, this is not a generated by a script, it's a actual heartfelt rant with links to researched references from www.fuckchristmas.org (plz note .org , not .com -- they're not the same thing, heh heh heh.)
If it's true -- talk about having egg on your face!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Attack of the (faked) clones.
Apparently this guy lied several times in his research writings, maybe just start over and see if he can duplicate his results?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
IAASCR (I am a stem cell researcher) This is a devastating development in terms of progress in the field of stem cells. With the current administration's decisions to ban research, it has been all but impossible to get frant funding (and those that do have to mask it as something else). More recently, though, there's been an emotional change, and an opportunity has opened to take advantage of American fear of falling behind - God forbid the USA be 2nd in anything.
When this paper came out, the American public backlash was far-reaching. Even a Southern Republican farm-boy starts thinking, "why can they do it and not us, pop?"
My hope is that the hashed-up funding mechanisms put in place following the original research have too much momentum to stall, and we might actually continue to gain ground. Maybe we'll have learned that advancing science is a continuous activity, and that falling behind feels bad...
Should be shot!
The BBC's Charles Scanlon in Seoul says the revelations have sparked a furious debate in the South Korean media.
Leading companies have pulled their advertisements from the television station that first revealed the reported problems with Dr Hwang's work.
Many commentators said it was unpatriotic to challenge someone who had given the country a lead in such a promising new area.
That is just scary. It is sad that a whistleblower, an advocate of truth, can be branded as "unpatriotic" for exposing a fraud. Once again nationalism and patriotism have overwealmed logic and common sense.
...and totally completely sick-o, twisted and perverted. I like it!
At this point, I suspect that enough hassle has gone into this issue, that perhaps, real research is now being said to be faked. Of course, I find it amazing that an individual would try to fake this. That would be very difficult as you have to show proof of what you have. Afterall, this is not a minor accomplishment.
At this point, I would question wether it happened or not.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Last month, Hwang admitted that some of the human eggs used in his experiments had come from junior researchers in his lab - an ethical lapse he had previously denied
This man's moral actions are debatable, but the fact that he lied about it doesn't help either.And while I believe that rival cloning firms/research teams are out for blood, if their stuff is so real, why would the good doctor's own team give silly excuses for questions raise on the research topic?
as someone else has posted, this link is better
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8461Did he think he'd get away with it?
Didn't pesky concerns like peer review, and other scientists attempting to repeat his success bother him?
Fake studies always gets exposed given time, so what benefit did he think he was getting out of this?
Dr. Handjob Give was unable to be reached for comment.
So I picked up this month's Scientific American and was reading the their "Scientific American 50" the other day and realized that they had named Hwang the "Research Leader of the Year".
If the allegations about fabricating and faking the data are true, then I'm curious what the editors at SciAm will do? Rename him to "Fraud Leader of the Year"?
:wq
Who is the West following then, given the fact that whistleblowers here are generally fucked over as well?
this headline was on my google homepage . . . i followed it and got the infamous:
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Zonk is a winner.
balls
The piece about using one of the lab assistance eggs is a 'morality' issue, and I agree not a very big one. Who cares where the egg came from?
The much larger issue that isn't just a morality issue is that it looks like he faked much of his evidence. This part has nothing to do with the morality. It looks like a bunch of the evidence presented was faked and the author has since withdraw his paper. While the study hasn't been disproved, it seems pretty clear that there were either grievous errors or it was a fake. Either way, it is no longer to be considered a valid study.
Many fakes are found months after when other labs try to reproduce the results in a paper. Its less usual to find them during the review of the paper. The scienitific method is to publish, reproduce and improve on others results.
A classic case was immunopsupression of skin grafts. One guy was painting mouse fur to appear like it came from a different result. People couldnt reproduce what he said he was supposed to be doing.
Insert comment about secret clone army for the republic here.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I'm really glad that none of that un-ethical medical behavior that 'religious nuts' were worried about has happen. This will most likely set the case of trusting in the ethics of scientific work on back a bit... "You cannot use people as a means to an end" - Kant
He is Sum Dum Fuk!
I wouldn't worry much.
I doubt most people are going to be able to connect the two. Even if they did connect the two, if stem cell research is as hopefull as it appears, the constant drum beat of advances in the field will drowned out this one set back.
Further, the only real issue at hand is federal funding of stem cell research. State and private funding have never been at issue. Sure, Alabama and Mississippi might struggle with whether or not to fund stem cell research, California and Massachusetts on the other hand don't. That isn't to say that federal funding isn't a nice thing to have for this type of stuff, just that it is only an obstacle, not a barrier.
I think in the long run it isn't going to matter. We are finding better ways to develop stem cells beyond embryonic methods. For better or for worse, as a population as a whole we always are going to feel a little moral queasiness about using fertilized eggs. If there is a way to get around it, we are going to use it. There is already a lot of promising research out there that suggests that this entire thing is going to end up being a non-issue as there are other sources of stem cells that are just as good as embryonic stem cells.
Technology solves a lot of moral problems. Infanticide is a good example. Infanticide was considered a morally acceptable practice throughout most of human history. People considered it immoral to bring a child into the world if it meant potentially killing others to feed that extra mouth. Today, in most developed nations infanticide is completely illegal and the morality implications are not pondered. Developed nations have more then enough food and institutions that will take unwanted infants, hence the moral question of infanticide has been rendered moot.
In my opinion, abortion, embryonic stem cells, and a whole host of societal problems are eventually going to go the way of infanticide. Technology is just going to simply solve the majority of problems associated with this questions. That isn't to down play how we have to struggle with those issues today, just to point out that the struggle won't last forever. In the end, neither those that advocate a pragmatic approach nor those who are trying to uphold some moral code win. In the end technology wins and shuts them both up.
It's about a web of trust where your investment is of time and ingenuity figuring out some riddle, WHATEVER the answer is. When the scientists to something that introduces more of a prefered answer the bar is raised for the trust. Then there are wider ethical implications about employee's providing tissue under duress. Poor adherence to ethical practices will also cast one's research in doubt. Since as opportunistic primates, our willingness to engage in deception for advantage is quite well documented.
Someone using their own eggs, or skin, or toe, or ass-hair in a therapy to improve their own well being is fine. They go to an expert, they get informed, they make an informed choice. Someone's boss even allowing them to so interject themselves into the research, particularly in a field where there is a high degree of ethical scrutiny demanded by an uncertain public, well that's not something a trustworthy boss would allow. The fact that they had these very seperate ethical problems is not unrelated. It's a response to the pressure, and that our species is good at opportunism, and it's just so easy so often. Now, a verly like very good, kind, and probably brilliant man, will have his career end, and everything he's ever done will have to be recheck, perhaps redone, because he did the one thing in science that cannot be forgiven. He lied.
You are not a stem cell researcher (they would never refer to themselves as such. The correct and proper term is developmental biologists).
Nice little bullshit story.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
They probabaly just copied off of someone else's paper...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
For the most original misspelling of the day. At least so far.
Haha, cannot innovate? You're kidding me right? How many of your consumer electronics are designed in Japan? They always seem to have the latest and best in electronics. How many of your latest computer motherboards and other products were designed and built by Taiwanese companies? Yea, I see their lack of creativity and innovation.
Now, I assume you are a Westerner but I have no way of knowing for sure. We, as in the West, may have began the great technological and scientific explosion in the past 200 years but who knows what will happen in the next 200 years. If the West is full of arrogant people like yourself then I fear the West may eventually be eclipsed by the East. I have never met a single East Asian person that did not value creativity so your opinion is just plain wrong. If you are going to give an opinion, at least give some evidence whether it be concrete facts or anecdotal evidence.
One thing to keep in mind through all the brouhaha is that it WORKED. Peer review identified the duplicate images, peer review found the chinks in falsified work, peer review identified this man as not entirely honest, and peer review has removed this man and his work from being weighted very heavily in the court of public opinion.
Given time, peer review and demand for experimental evidence will uncover fraud and untruth. It's the scientific way.
The scientific process does not guarantee 100% accuracy at any point. No system can. But, the scientific process is a slow, iterative process that, over time, tends towards truth, building on past understandings.
It's the ONLY process found that does this consistently, and it's something that we must cling to tightly. Faith, reason, and personal insight have all shown dramatic, consistent, and spectacular failures.
But, introducing the idea that nothing is ever trusted completely (which is why Science calls bodies of knowledge "theories" even when very well proven) and demanding evidence and peer review thereof to identify truth allows us, with our feeble intellect and reasoning powers, to identify the small, provable and demonstrable bits of truth in a vast sea of lies, untruths, semi-truths, spin, pseudo-science, and other forms of intellectual horseshit.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I do agree that it isn't the "attempt to generate human cloning" isn't at issue here (there is an issue but that is another /. post for another day). The issue is simply this: To find a readily available source of material, did he asked his subordinates to provide the material? How much of this is "asked" vs "ordered" vs "threat" vs "we do this or fail" we may never find out. Considering if you are a research assistent working on your Ph.D under him and he approached you for tissue. If you say "yes" then the research goes on, your doctorate based upon helping write up the research, and a glowing letter of recommendation. If you turn him down, not only is there a risk the project could be a wash (weak research to write a paper on) but he may flunk you/not write a letter of recommendation/etc. By crossing the line and asking to experiment on his subordinates, he has put his subordinates in a seriously comprised position and possibly tainted the observed results which we may now find out to be fabricated.
The complaint is about a leader using their power to abuse their subordinates which is highly unethical in *any field*.
Ok so the Japanese rock at designing walkmans and videogames and the Taiwanese are good at manufacturing motherboards for computers. (blank stare) AND??? I could be totally wrong, but I suspect that much of the design actually comes from European or American engineers. Aren't the chipsets used on motherboards designed by companies such as Advanced Micro Designs and Intel? And don't lecture us about East Asians valuing creativity. If they did, the governments would not allow DVD copies of King Kong to be sold on every street corner for $1.50. There is no respect for copyright. There is no respect for copyright, instead, the idea is reverse engineered and mass produced.
1 steps forward, 2 fake steps backward. the rest of the walk do it underground, nobody is going to boder you if everybody thinks it does not work.
So I picked up this month's Scientific American and was reading the their "Scientific American 50" the other day and realized that they had named Hwang the "Research Leader of the Year" [sciam.com].
If the allegations about fabricating and faking the data are true, then I'm curious what the editors at SciAm will do? Rename him to "Fraud Leader of the Year"?
No, "Re-Research Leader Of The Year".
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
The point is his research is not about human cloning. He cloned human embryo and extracted stem cells. In his 2005 science paper, his team made 11 stem cell lines that were cloned and extracted from 5-6 different donors who have fatal illnesses like spinal cord injury, which was considered as a landmark research, because it clearly showed not only the possibility of clinical application of the stem cell treatment but also the highly effective procedure(11 cell lines out of 150eggs). It turned out, however, none of these stem cells from the patients don't even seem to exist. He fabricated the result by taking pictures of several stem cell lines from IVF embryo (not cloned, but fertilized)and manipulated into 11 different pictures. His DNA result also seemed to look unusually identical, which people started supecting that the data were not from the different cells. After being questioned, he has refused to validate his result by DNA finger printing. Now one of his co-worker disclosed the fact that the whole research was faked. Before this news came out, the korean government even awarded him 26.5 billion without any official funding proposal and all of korean media had been singing his name every day since his paper came out, so this is not a media or ethicists killing scientist or stem cell research. This is a big ugly lie made by an ambitious scientist who has no morality and conscience.
Heh, someone is going to post "I typed that link in at work, and my boss was watching!" or "Oh god, I sent the .com link to everyone in the company!", even though you warned them.
All of the brightest boys, To play with the biggest toys - More than they bargained for...
that's how science works. everybody thinks you're a kook pushing a crock. evidence with errors looks better than evidence with absolutely no errors, and where everything exactly supports the theory. on its face, a work with all the curves being exactly the same should raise all the red flags you got.
once other researchers duplicate the claims, and prove the experiments are repeatable and the claims justifyable, then the real debate on some nutty new theory can begin.
until then, "it's a startling new claim that, if proven, may have far-reaching applications." which is how scientists say "well, foock me! -- first I've heard of it. does it really work?"
it appears this korean scientist doesn't have anything in his favor, and hope he gets through the Korean equivalent of McDonalds school (kimchee university?) to start his new career.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
(and those that do have to mask it as something else)
Masking the intents of what research money will be used for? Misappropriating funds? Having a grant to do something and then not working on it? Please. That goes against how grants are given and the whole grant proposal process. He's full of shit.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
One thing to point out is that scientific fraud at this level of the scientific game, while not unprecedented, is quire rare. And a big part of this is simply due to the fact that anything truly important is worth replicating and extending, and a result that was faked is often impossible to replicate because it is the wrong result. I like to think that scientists are more honest than average, but surely to some extent it is the fear and shame of being caught doing this that keeps them more honest than that.
So I was trying to think of frauds that even come close to competing with the high profile that this case could assume, and it hasn't been easy. The Piltdown Hoax was very different in spirit. The faking of data in the report of element 118 might be close, but the original report got nothing like press attention that the Korean cloning breakthrough did. Can anybody else think of anything that really would compete?
Babar
When I received this on battle.net U.S. west: Pimp_Azn_Hwang: 1 CBABY 4 UR 10 SOJ. 2 CBABY 4 UR 100 PSKULLS. Limited tyme off3r loLz!11 Considering cloned babies hadn't even showed up on bnet's official D2 item list, it was obvious!
Wow. I've read this story before - back when it was J. Hendrik Schon faking experiments at Bell Labs, with his collaborators eventually stuck with retracting 17 Science and Nature papers.
The similarities are incredibly striking, including (according to the New Scientist) duplicated figures within papers and between papers claiming to be different samples.
What motivates someone to (apparently) fake results like this, when they're almost sure to be caught?
The cornerstone of ethical research concerning human subjects research is "free and informed consent". A subordinate agreeing to participate is not "free" consent (for the reasons mentioned in the earlier posts). These guidelines are part of a worldwide norm for human subjects research (so that a rich company cannot just go to Africa and pay people to be subjects) and every researcher is expected to know them. It really is shameful that such high profile research was carried out by violating these basic safeguards.
If you're talking about theft of intellectual property, people everywhere are guilty of that, not just those in Asia. Just look at the popularity of technologies like BitTorrent, where some people "liberate" content. Furthermore, isn't the free flow of ideas something that /.-ers generally prefer to see? Technical innovation can consist of both inspiration and perspiration. Developing technology isn't strictly a pure brute-force process, I'd guess that clever researchers in all parts of the world have been able to advance science and technology.
Technology-wise, many of these Japanese and Taiwanese firms that you're bashing have pushed the technological boundaries farther than their Western compatriots. As another poster mentioned, much of the laptop designs these days are done in Taiwan. While you might bash their work as being cookie-cutter, the engineers there had to be be creative in order to create things that could be easily mass-produced. That takes a certain type of engineering brilliancel, wouldn't you say? If you're talking purely stylistic things, like the industrial design used by the iPod, that's pretty subjective - what works for some people don't necessarily work for everyone. However, there are high end design firms in East Asia as well. Witness some of the high end electronics vendors, particularly the Japanese. A lot of their gadgets, while possibly not "useful", are pretty creative, right?
I'm also assuming that you haven't watched East Asian movies? I'd say that the choreography of many martial arts movies are pretty creative, much more than some of the recent Hollywood flicks that have come out. And then there's anime. While not to the taste of some viewers, on the whole I'd say that they're much more creative, in many respects, than Western cartoons.
In any case, copyright is a Western legal idea that has some mixed blessings, as some of our /. compatriots can attest to. Copyright can be used to protect ideas, as well as to stifle creativity. It all depends on the legal structures that enforce copyright, the legislative bodies that codify the laws, and the judicial processes used to enforce them. A lot of the more "loosely" enforced nations seem to have higher growth rates, oddly enough.
Need I say more.
they already did
i cleID=000D550E-D624-13A1-962483414B7F0000
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&art
With a name like Dr. "Dang, you suck", it seemed sort of odd from the get go.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
I have replicated S. Korea's faked clone experiment.
This comes after Scientific American lauded Woo Suk Hwang as the "Research Leader of the Year" (Scientific American, Dec 2005, pg 48) [I'm sure this is also available online at sciam.com, but I can't find it.] This article goes into great detail about his discoveries and some of his methods, too. It would thus appear that Hwang has either 1) been the victim of a merciless Slashdotting (unlikely) or 2) managed to fool everyone, including Sciam. Oh what a bad day for science this is :(
It seems that the quality of a variety of studies have been commented on here:
p mid=15905366&webenv=0MfZpYQdbpUgMNgoIaO-4e5bATln-n fTFLfOBD7aMSSW293Svyfl51%40WLQnx4IOFpkAAEVzYIYAAAA B&qkey=1&rescnt=1&retstart=0&q=Patient-specific+em bryonic+stem+cells+derived+from+human+SCNT+blastoc ysts
http://www.journalreview.org/
For example:
Patient-specific embryonic stem cells derived from human SCNT blastocysts.
by Hwang WS, et al.
http://journalreview.org/view_pubmed_article.php?
They used high pressure techniques, but not personal threats. The TV people went to Pittsburgh and told researchers that they had evidence showing that the results were fake, to try to get them to talk. And they weren't bluffing, either. As MBC showed this week, the evidence was real.
I haven't heard anything about hidden cameras though. If the cameras were really hidden, that is bad. Depending on the circumstances, the use of hidden cameras to record private conversations can be illegal in the US. (For what that's worth...)
But Koreans certainly feel strongly about it. What I find most disturbing are reports like this:
link
Their culture values cheating. Gone to school with these types? Or played Starcraft? Anyone surprised?
Not to do the whole "reply to myself" thing, but what idiot of a moderator mods down offtopic replys to an offtopic post?
*elevator music plays*
...peer review keeps the science journals from being as accurate as Wikipedia?
The Japanese are not just good at designing walkmans and videogames. Its funny though you just brush those things aside like it was something trivial. Designing electronics and videogames requires engineering skills and lots of creativity but I digress. Japan is a world leader in robotics and AI research. They pioneered using robotics in manufacturing. They are also able to build robots that are extrememly human-like and much more advanced then anything in the West. Japanese cars are some of the best engineered cars in the world with the latest technology and designs at affordable prices. These are just some of the things, technology-wise, the Japanese are good at doing. The Japanese also produce great anime and movies that are very popular in the West. They might not be to your taste but that does not make the Japanese any less creative.
Like I said before, Taiwanese companies design and manufacture the latest motherboards. Yes, the chipsets are designed by AMD and Intel. However, you still need to have engineers that are creative to be able to design superior motherboards that can be manufactured easily. In addition to motherboards, Taiwanese companies, as well as Japanese and Korean, are leaders in LCD and plasma TV technology.
I'm assuming you don't watch too many Hong Kong movies. I am a huge fan of HK flicks. Films such as Hardboiled, Infernal Affairs trilogy, and Kung Fu Hustle are the more well known ones. You should check them out. In fact, Hollywood recently purchased the rights to Infernal Affairs and they are filming a remake called The Departed. Hollywood is now starting to look the East for ideas.
China, after having its creativity stifled by a half century of communism, is finally starting to wake. The Chinese movie industry, although still in its infancy compared to Hollywood, is creating some great world renowned films. Films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero are very popular in the West. There are also huge variety of other films that very good but less well known. If you're interested, I'll be happy to tell you more about them and give you some recommendations on what to watch. China is also one of the leading countries in research on nano-technology and genetics and genetically-engineered(GE) food products. They have a huge population to feed so its understandable why they are concentrating so much on the latter.
In regards to copyrights, I agree that China's patent and copyright laws are very weak. They are working to reform and update their legal system due to their entry in to the WTO. You have to understand these things take time. They just opened up their economy after a half a decade of communism and revolution. Chinese people do not have a good understanding of our idea of copyrights and patents yet but it is changing. Recently, police in the southern Chinese province of Guanzhou arrested several professional bootleggers and confiscated and destroyed hundresds of thousands of pirated cds. I'm to lazy search for the story but it should be on google.
Anyways, this is gettting too long. I think I made my point. Sorry for the spelling and grammar problems. I typed this up pretty fast. Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
The Japanese are not just good at designing walkmans and videogames. Its funny though you just brush those things aside like it was something trivial. Designing electronics and videogames requires engineering skills and lots of creativity but I digress. Japan is a world leader in robotics and AI research. They pioneered using robotics in manufacturing. They are also able to build robots that are extrememly human-like and much more advanced then anything in the West. Japanese cars are some of the best engineered cars in the world with the latest technology and designs at affordable prices. These are just some of the things, technology-wise, the Japanese are good at doing. The Japanese also produce great anime and movies that are very popular in the West. They might not be to your taste but that does not make the Japanese any less creative.
Like I said before, Taiwanese companies design and manufacture the latest motherboards. Yes, the chipsets are designed by AMD and Intel. However, you still need to have engineers that are creative to be able to design superior motherboards that can be manufactured easily. In addition to motherboards, Taiwanese companies, as well as Japanese and Korean, are leaders in LCD and plasma TV technology.
I'm assuming you don't watch too many Hong Kong movies. I am a huge fan of HK flicks. Films such as Hardboiled, Infernal Affairs trilogy, and Kung Fu Hustle are the more well known ones. You should check them out. In fact, Hollywood recently purchased the rights to Infernal Affairs and they are filming a remake called The Departed. Hollywood is now starting to look the East for ideas.
China, after having its creativity stifled by a half century of communism, is finally starting to wake. The Chinese movie industry, although still in its infancy compared to Hollywood, is creating some great world renowned films. Films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero are very popular in the West. There are also huge variety of other films that very good but less well known. If you're interested, I'll be happy to tell you more about them and give you some recommendations on what to watch. China is also one of the leading countries in research on nano-technology and genetics and genetically-engineered(GE) food products. They have a huge population to feed so its understandable why they are concentrating so much on the latter.
In regards to copyrights, I agree that China's patent and copyright laws are very weak. They are working to reform and update their legal system due to their entry in to the WTO. You have to understand these things take time. They just opened up their economy after a half a decade of communism and revolution. Chinese people do not have a good understanding of our idea of copyrights and patents yet but it is changing. Recently, police in the southern Chinese province of Guanzhou arrested several professional bootleggers and confiscated and destroyed hundresds of thousands of pirated cds. I'm to lazy search for the story but it should be on google.
Anyways, this is gettting too long. I think I made my point. Sorry for the spelling and grammar problems. I typed this up pretty fast. Thanks for taking the time to read my post.