• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.67-90
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• 2007

Could STS throw another-colored light on the Hwang's Affair, the scientific fraud committed by Hwang Woo-Suk and his research team in Korea? And could analytic tools of STS unfold another meanings which have been overlooked in most of the traditionally social-sciences-oriented analyses? In this essay, I try to answer these questions by analyzing the Hwang's Affair in the view of STS, especially by using some concepts of actor-network theory(ANT): movement, translation and displacement. I want to say that the Hwang's Affair seems to be a part of normal scientific activity, not an abnormal phenomenon, and as an evidence, focus on the similarities of their life styles between "pure/real scientist" Louis Pasteur and "impure/political scientist" Hwang Woo-Suk. I try to mobilize some concepts of ANT, especially movement, and find out why scientists came to move toward the opposed direction on the pure/real-impure/political line. I suggest that there exists "laboratory politics" as the key factor in this bifurcation. My tentative conclusion is that Pasteur can take a position to make his great world, so-called the Pasteurian world, owing to the success of "double movement" in which he treated his laboratory as a fulcrum to lift up the world, but Hwang degrades himself to "ugly scientific politician" due to the loss of the momentum of his movement; Hwang treated his laboratory only as the symbolic resources and in turn failed to solidify material entities, his real political resources, even though he knew the importance of laboratory.