The Wenchuan earthquake certainly wrong-footed CEA headquarters. After the quake struck, it took less than 6 minutes for the initial seismic waves to leave Chinese soil. By the time the waves had reached the far corners of the globe 20 minutes later, USGS’s National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado had pinpointed the epicenter and assigned a preliminary magnitude of 7.5. Meanwhile, CEA’s automated software determined, erroneously, that a magnitude-3.9 earthquake had struck the Beijing suburb of Tongzhou and posted the information to CEA’s Web site. Minutes later, CEA identified the correct epicenter and updated the Web site. By evening, a 230-person-strong CEA team had arrived in Dujiangyan(Science, 23 May, p. 996). But an incorrect calculation of the moment tensor—a mathematical description of a fault’s movement during a quake—lingered on the Web site for 4 days.

The errors left CEA’s cadre of scientists red-faced. The massive agency employs some 10,000 people, but only about 100 are Ph.D. scientists. “The problem is at the top, says Chen Yuntai, honorary director of CEA’s Institute of Geophysics. “The root cause of the mistakes is not placing importance on the science.” Perhaps as a result, says Peking (Beijing) University geophysicist Huang Qinghua, “CEA is isolated from the scientific community.”