China's top agriculture authority announced it would start investigating a national GM technology watchdog on Tuesday after a whistleblower claimed the center has employed unqualified staff, avoided its duties and compiled unscientific reports.
The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) said on its official website on Monday that its affiliated center of safety supervision and inspection for GM animals and GM feed is facing a Ministry of Agriculture investigation after Wei Jingliang, a doctoral student at CAAS, accused the center of "scientific fraud" online.
On Sunday, Wei claimed that the center compiled numerous reports without proper scientific checks, employed unqualified students to conduct inspections under illegal labor contracts as well as shirking almost every inspection job it was asked to perform to avoid possible accidents and risks, news portal thepaper.cn reported on Monday.
Zhang Junmin, deputy director of the Institute of Animal Sciences of CAAS, argued that while there have been certain flaws in the center's filing system and the quality of its operations, he denied Wei's accusations of "scientific fraud."
The GM inspection center hasn't received any national-level tasks nor published any scientific reports since its establishment under the Institute of Animal Sciences of CAAS due to the slow development of technology for GM animals, rather than any attempts to avoid doing work, Zhang told thepaper.cn.
Zhang also argued that the routine focus for research teams at the center is their own experiments and its management capability is "not quite standardized."
