Heads roll as ‘mind power’ egg scandal rocks China
- Vocational college and journal shut down as authorities investigate payment-to-publish culture plaguing academic publishing
- Principal claimed her students could hatch boiled eggs using the power of their minds
Guo Ping, who founded the college, was lead author of a paper outlining the experiments and their extraordinary results which was published last month in tourism journal Pictorial Geography.
Guo’s article caused a national scandal after receiving wide attention on China’s social media. State broadcaster CCTV and Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily questioned how it could have been published at all.
“Peeling back this ‘revived’ boiled egg, [we] see the cliched trick of scammers, and profits from shady business models. We also need to reflect on how such a ‘finding’ could have been published in an academic journal. What kind of a journal is this?” a People’s Daily column said on Tuesday.
“Our society does not allow a deceitful shell. Science cannot tolerate a lying egg.”
According to People’s Daily, this was not the first time Guo had published bizarre claims. Previous papers include how to grow sprouts from cooked beans, and how to make objects go through walls.