The 15 genetic projects launched by Harvard University in China's Anhui Province is not only "wrong" but "badly wrong", said Harvard President Lawrence Summers when visiting Peking University on May 14.
Mr Summers' speech on the impact of globalization on higher education attracted near thousand students from Peking University. After that, they raised questions on the 15 human researches conducted by Harvard in rural area of China's Anhui Province.
The Harvard President, who once was the financial minister of Clinton Administration, didn't evade the mistakes Harvard made in China. He admitted the researches were "badly wrong" and said he, and the Harvard University he leads, should be held responsible for this, adding that scientific studies should not be carried out at the cost of farmers' health and this is a kind of discrimination towards farmers.
These human researches, staring from 1995, was conducted under the name of cooperation between the Public Health Institute under Harvard University and concerned universities in Anhui and took farmers in Yuexi County in Dabieshan Mountain as their objects. Over ten thousand farmers, many with their whole families, were asked to participate in "physical checks" and give blood samples for at least twice. But they didn't have the slightest idea to where their samples were send and for what purpose.
A department with the US Federal Government began to investigate into these projects in 1999 and published a report at the end of last March, which claimed serious irregularities in conducting these researches. For example, the farmer participants were not informed in advance the danger and bad feelings would be brought by X-ray and lung function tests. The research agreements were written and signed in a language difficult for these farmers to understand, which infringed participants' right to learn the truth. The report also pointed out that serious moral questions existed in Harvard's projects in rural China.
As known, the Harvard University has announced its entire agreement with the investigation report and hoped to make improvements on the current supervisory mechanism for scientific studies, such as increasing supervisory staff and telling researchers to be more careful in choosing objects for their tests.
(People's Daily May 15, 2002)
