Why is it that the most bizarre — and disturbing — science stories always come from Asia, usually China or India? (I can say that, I’m from India).

I live about three blocks from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which has some of the most stunning displays anywhere of dinosaur fossils. People come from all over the world to gawk at these wonders.

In China’s Henan province, it seems, I could have bought dinosaur bones for a mere 50 cents per kilogram.

For at least the last 20 years, villagers in China have apparently been grinding up precious dinosaur bones and boiling them in soup to treat dizziness, leg cramps and such or making a paste and applying them to fractures. One local had collected up to 8,000 kilos of bones, according to the BBC.

The villagers did this because they believed that the bones were from dragons that could fly in the sky and had special powers, according to Dong Zhiming of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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On a far more serious and horrible note, China has executed its former Food and Administration chief, who had been made the scapegoat for all its recent problems with the regulation of food and drugs. The Associated Press led its story on this saying it was “the strongest signal yet from Beijing that it is serious about tackling its product safety crisis.”

I’m sorry, what??

How is rushing to execute one man, who became a convenient symbol for everything that ails China’s regulatory system, an indication that the country is serious about fixing its problems?

Although many versions of this story included the offensive phrase, (The Guradian, the NYT) some papers at least (The Independent) edited it out. China may blunder in its rush to fix its image, but we should be demanding an actual clean up of the system, not this tyrannical turn of events, as proof of its intentions.