Rock stars of science?

I am still trying to put my finger on why this piece by GQ, reported by The Scientist, disturbs me so much.  GQ has tried to make science sexy by depicting scientists as rock stars along side real rock stars.  From The Scientist:

Rudy Tanzi, Joe Perry, and Francis Collins
Image: Geoffrey Beene / GQ

In the June issue of GQ, a popular men's fashion magazine, 11 of America's leading biomedical researchers appear alongside celebrated pop musicians for a multi-page spread called "Rock Stars of Science." The scientists traded in their elbow-patched tweed for snazzier, designer threads, for a photo shoot that the organizers of the project, a charitable men's clothing brand, hope will help heighten the public's awareness of these biologists and their work while showcasing the need for greater science funding.

"We need to get the best and brightest excited to go into science and medicine," David Agus, a University of Southern California cancer researcher, who was photographed alongside Scripps cardiologist Eric Topol and multi-platinum-selling singer Seal, told The Scientist. "This is an innovative way to bring attention to research."

And why would anyone do such a spread?  According to Meryl Comer, who came up with the campaign, scientists need more public exposure:

The campaign is the brainchild of Meryl Comer, president of the Geoffrey Beene Gives Back Alzheimer's Initiative, a philanthropic wing of the Geoffrey Beene menswear label, which donates all its net profits to support medical and educational research and outreach. She said she was inspired after reading a March 2008 Harris Interactive survey, conducted on behalf of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, which found that only 4% of Americans could name a single living scientist. "I said, 'Well, let's celebrate scientists," Comer told The Scientist. "They're rock stars."

I understand that this is all supposed to be a slight bit tongue-in-cheek, but frankly I don't want my science sexy, nor do I want my scientists to be rock stars.  I don't want scientists to be easily recognizable by the public. 

Why?  One name comes to mind.  Dr. Hwang Woo Suk.  Over night he became a rock star in South Korea, all for fraudulent results.  Do not tell me the quest for fame and fortune did not have anything to do with the falsification of his results.  Just in case you need a reminder, here is a quote from the New York Times on Hwang:

Copyright 2006 The New York Times

Dr. Hwang began drawing the country's adulation when, in February 2004, he became an international celebrity for writing in the leading scientific journal, Science, that he had cloned human embryos. In June 2005, he published a paper, again in Science, to the effect that he had developed a technique to extract embryonic stem cells from fewer human eggs than previous methods required. This further raised the hopes for therapeutic cloning and the possibility of converting a patient's own cells into new tissues to treat various diseases.

The papers transformed Dr. Hwang into a national hero: a handsome 53-year-old scientist who had risen from humble origins to lead South Korea to places it and the rest of the world had not seen. Web sites went up in his honor, women volunteered to donate eggs, Korean Air volunteered to fly him anywhere free.

The government of President Roh Moo Hyun, who had embraced and promoted him aggressively, gave him millions of dollars in research money, made him the country's top scientist and assigned him bodyguards. It issued a postage stamp that engraved Dr. Hwang's promise to make paralyzed people walk through images of a man in a wheelchair who stands up, dances and embraces a woman. The government also extolled his exploits in government school textbooks, describing him in a sixth-grade textbook as a challenger for the Nobel Prize....

In this atmosphere, Dr. Hwang became untouchable.

"Many of us didn't trust him," Kim Jae Sup, professor of developmental biology at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, said of Korean scientists. "But the pressure from the public and government to support him actually inhibited our criticism."

Anthony Fauci, Sheryl Crow, and Harold Varmus
Image: Geoffrey Beene / GQ