Can you still recall: When you were 11 years old, what were the best classmates around you doing? They may participate in various children's "Olympic Games" to achieve dazzling results, or they may not have a strong sense of creativity, and apply for one or two patents with clever inventions. However, many people may not expect that 11-year-old children will seriously start a "doctor-level" scientific research project, and with such a project, they will win prizes in the National Youth Science and Technology Innovation Competition.
However, in a primary school in Panlong District, Kunming City, Yunnan Province, such a "prodigy" was only 11 years old. According to reports, the student Chen Moumou won the third prize in the 2019 National Youth Science and Technology Innovation Contest for his project "C10orf67 in the Function and Mechanism of Colorectal Cancer Development". After the news was reported by the media, it caused public uproar for a while.
Obviously, Chen Moumou's research content is far beyond the public's imagination of primary school students' technological innovation, and it is obviously a project that only professional researchers have the ability to get involved in. For this reason, many netizens questioned whether there was a “assistance” of professionals behind Chen Moumou, and whether the award was a “credit” to the operation of his family?
On July 13, the official website of the Kunming Institute of Zoology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences issued a statement saying that after preliminary verification, the students of the "C10orf67 function and mechanism research in the development of colorectal cancer" were the sons of the researchers. According to the "Beijing News" report, the parents of the award-winning student Chen Moumou were the two researchers Chen Yongbin and Yang Cuiping of the institute. In response to this matter, the institute has established an investigation team to conduct an in-depth investigation.
It is worth noting that the suspiciousness of this winning project is not only reflected in Chen Moumou's kinship. The key mutant gene C10orf67 in the project was discovered by his father Chen Yongbin for the first time; his mother Yang Cuiping was the project leader of "C10orf67 in the function and mechanism of hypoxic adaptation and the development of non-small cell lung cancer". These facts make people doubt Chen Moumou's project and took the "free ride" that his parents studied.
In response to this, many experts, including children's blood tumor experts, Sichuan Academy of Medical Sciences, deputy chief physician of Pediatrics of Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital Zhou Chenyan, etc., said in an interview with the media that such research far exceeds the intelligence of 11-year-old students Level and cognitive ability, Chen Moumou participated in the experiment under the guidance of others at most, it is impossible to independently propose research, let alone what is "scientific and technological innovation". If the survey verifies the claims of professionals, then such a project to participate in the awards clearly deviates from the original intention of the National Youth Science and Technology Innovation Competition to encourage children and children to innovate independently, and turns the competition into a stage for individual children with background.
For a long time, people in the community have always hated all kinds of "fighting fathers". The so-called "fighting father", in essence, is to put the resources provided by the background and family background above the personal efforts and form obvious injustice. We have seen the "rich second generation" use the property of the family to "protect" the prestigious schools by bribing admission officers. We have also seen the "second generation" use the power of their parents to easily occupy well-paid public office positions. Not long ago, Southwest Jiaotong University also had a malignant incident in which the "second generation of the school" used the influence of the professor's father to falsify his achievements. Every similar incident will seriously erode public confidence in social justice.
Compared with these events, the stage of the National Youth Science and Technology Innovation Competition does not seem to have much room for fraud using money, power or professional influence, so it should be a pure land that has nothing to do with the "X 2nd generation". If there is also a “second generation of research” running out of this field and using the research results of parents to seize the awards, the impact on education equity can be imagined.
In response to this kind of "prodigy" incident, many netizens have put forward a pragmatic suggestion, that is, in the future competitions of the same kind, add a defense interview session, so as to test whether the young people who participated in the competition did not understand what they did. For a high-profile national competition, setting such a schedule is not excessive. After all, such a project that even ordinary netizens can see the doubts, can even get awards through layers of audits, which fully exposed the lack of supervision of the competition organizers.
If the supervision is not strict and the awards are random, the competition that was originally intended to encourage technological innovation will sooner or later become a stage of "fairy fights" among parents engaged in scientific research, and exclude those children who truly love technological innovation.
To this end, whether it is the organizer of the National Youth Science and Technology Innovation Contest or other regulators in the social field who need to maintain fairness, they should learn from them and use more effective monitoring measures to prevent the occurrence of "fighting fathers".
Yang Xinyu Source: China Youth Daily
July 15, 2020 Version 02