It is quite possible that most of the new inventions will be coming from China, and also most of China's scientific production will be rubbish. China has been great with scaling up its scientific community, but the problem of establishing an academic culture of scientific honesty is harder.
I'm a bit confused by this comment. Are you implying that "an academic culture of scientific honesty" is something the non-Chinese world has but China doesn't?
You are demonstrating awareness of the point being made: if scientific fraud was as rampant here as it is in China, Theranos wouldn't even be remarkable and still unknown. But it is in fact rare enough to cause scandal.
If you want to keep that attitude and make non-contributory quips, go back to Reddit. It is not appreciated here.
Most of Big Pharma's medicines don't actually work.
As in, they don't work to cure the underlying condition. They work to treat the symptoms, and thereby require you to take the medicine fairly indefinitely if you want to by symptom free, side effects notwithstanding. Thereby extracting economic value from the generally unwell and ageing population and concentrating it in the hands of Big Pharma.
In that way I see most of medicine as being fraudulent.
Also, you're probably being down-voted for your last sentence, as it is, as you say not appreciated here.
If Big Pharma developed treatments-rather-than-cures as a deliberate strategy to milk recurring revenue, biotech startups could ignore those recurring treatments and take over the market with easier-or-equally-difficult-to-find one shot cures that doctors, patients, and insurance companies would all prefer. But it turns out that Biology is Hard and the indefinite treatments are still used because neither incumbents nor startups have been able to find drugs that are once-and-for-all cures for diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson's, etc. It's the same reason we don't have Mr. Fusion powering our cars instead of liquid hydrocarbons: not because the sinister oil cartels are suppressing technology, but because developing that sort of breakthrough is extremely hard.
And then you get to this convoluted certification and approval process that more or less guarantees that the startup is going to be dead before it starts selling anything.
Certainly, it's an issue throughout the West as well, to a degree. For that matter, my guess would be that the culture of honesty is improving in China while it worsens in, say, the U.S..
Quite a few Chinese with PhDs earned it from abroad (US, Europe). With the lack of resources in the US for students obtaining professorship, many of them are going back to China with lucrative offers. They will bring back whatever they learned in the US - and if they saw scientific integrity in the labs here, then they will transform it in China.
In parallel, like how China has been cracking down on political corruption because it doesn't benefit the people, I imagine/hope they do the same for academic dishonesty.
