http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/308/5730/1852b Science, Vol 308, Issue 5730, 1852 , 24 June 2005 Summary of this Article PDF Version of this Article E-Letters: Submit a response to this article [DOI: 10.1126/science.308.5730.1852b] News of the Week TAIWAN: New University President Has Links to Paranormal Research Lei Du* JINAN, CHINA--The Taiwan government has chosen a devotee of research into paranormal phenomena to lead its premier university. Lee Si-chen, a semiconductor physicist at National Taiwan University (NTU), says he plans to end his current experiments of parapsychology once he takes office this week as NTU's 16th president. But faculty members are worried that those experiments, prominently displayed on Lee's CV and Web site, will undermine his efforts to make NTU, founded in 1928, a world-class institution. Lee, 52, previously dean of academic affairs at NTU, is well regarded for his work in solid state physics. "Professor Lee has certainly made several important contributions to semiconductor heterojunction device physics," says James Harris, a semiconductor physicist at Stanford University in California. Trained at Stanford and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the leading international society for electrical and electronics engineers, Lee says he wants to make NTU one of the world's top 100 universities by wooing top-ranked scientists from around the globe and building new research and teaching facilities. In conjunction with his administrative and scientific labors, however, Lee has maintained an active interest in the paranormal. His research into Qigong (a Chinese practice combining meditation and breathing exercises) has favorably examined claims that so-called external Qi is capable of altering the nature of materials without any physical contact. He has also explored the phenomenon of "finger-reading," which purports that school-aged children can be trained to visualize numbers, Chinese characters, and symbols written on paper that is wadded up and placed in their hands. That work bothers some of his colleagues. This spring, Yang Shin-nan, a physicist and delegate to the university's faculty senate, wrote an open letter expressing his fear that Lee's appointment could damage the university's reputation. NTU physicist Kao Yeong-Chuan, a longtime critic of Lee's paranormal research, says that he was "shocked that Professor Lee could get enough votes to become one of the two finalists." Kao is willing to cut Lee some slack, but he says that "extra-ordinary claims must be backed up by extraordinary evidence." Lee, who was appointed to a 4-year term, defends his line of investigation. "Everybody is welcome to reasonably challenge other people's research, but not to reject all unusual phenomena bluntly and arrogantly," he says, adding that most of his studies on finger-reading were done to confirm the work of others. "Scientists should not be forbidden from exploring the unknown frontier." Lee acknowledges, however, that findings have been inconsistent because human beings are "unsteady." And although he would like to find more quantifiable metrics for studying such phenomena, he says he plans to terminate his experiments "for the sake of a peaceful campus." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lei Du is a freelance writer in Shandong Province, China. --

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