60 Minutes - 5/16/2016: Breakthrough Status, Collateral Damage

Episode Date: May 16, 2016

Scott Pelley follows patients in a clinical trial of a new cancer therapy with results promising enough to make the treatment a breakthrough. Bill Whitaker reports on innocent American citizens accused of espionage-related crimes as the government steps up the fight against Chinese theft of U.S. trade secrets and intellectual property.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. What's better than a well-marbled

ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. It's a hell of a thing to be told you have months to live when you're 20 years old. But that's what happened to Stephanie Lipscomb in 2011, diagnosed with the worst kind of brain tumor, glioblastoma.

She became one of the first patients in Duke University's cancer trial to be given, of all things, the polio virus as a last chance to fight her disease. Today, four years later, she is cancer-free, and she's not the only one. This, to me, is the most promising therapy I've seen in my career, period. 60 Minutes has been following this daring experiment for more than two years, and now the federal government has given it rare breakthrough status meaning this dramatic new way of treating cancer will become more available all across the country before you put handcuffs on someone and take them away that you got to make sure that you've got your case together and that the facts add up.

And in these cases? Facts didn't add up. The U.S. government has launched aggressive investigations and a greater number of prosecutions to stop the theft of American trade secrets by suspected Chinese spies. But we've discovered the dragnet is ensnaring a growing number of Americans who aren't spies at all. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight

on 60 Minutes. Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side. Or B-side. Or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Podcasts are great because they help us make the most out of our routine. We learn about the fall of the Ottoman Empire while we drive. Keep up with news while we take the dog for a walk.

Or turn folding laundry into a comedy show. Make the most out of your time with the PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard. A credit card that can get you unlimited free grocery delivery and the most PC optimum points on everyday purchases. The PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard. The card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit PCFinancial.ca for details. A bold experiment to kill a vicious cancer has won breakthrough status from the Food and Drug Administration. Early tests at Duke University have been so successful, the FDA will fast-track this treatment to hundreds of patients while it's still being evaluated for final approval. The therapy is audacious.

It uses the poliovirus to attack a virulent brain cancer called glioblastoma, which is a death sentence of astonishing speed that leaves patients with only months to live. For two years, we've been following volunteers in the Duke clinical trial. We have witnessed nearly miraculous recoveries and unexpected defeats on a journey of discovery beyond the known frontiers of science. Nancy Justice had been sentenced to oblique prognosis when we met her in October 2014. At age 58, she had recurrent glioblastoma. It had come back after surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Typically, she could expect to live seven months. The polio virus which mankind had

fought to eradicate from the earth was the last chance she had in the world. You might feel just a tiny tug there. A half teaspoon of polio flowed through a catheter inserted through Nancy's skull directly into her tumor. Okay. Ready to go? Are you ready to go? I'm ready. Bring it on.

We're starting. 921. If you feel anything, you let us know. I will, definitely. Her husband, Greg, constantly inflated a buoyant optimism to save him from the weight of the unknown. Okay. Her glioblastoma was diagnosed in the 21st year of Nancy and Greg's marriage, just as the Georgia couple could make out the finish line for Zach and Luke at college.

Her tumor can double in size every two weeks. The tumor was aggressive, so you wanted an aggressive treatment. Yes, yes. You're a medical explorer. Does it feel that way to you? I'm taking it one day at a time. It sounds very lofty to say medical explorer, but, you know, throughout all of this, if this gives other people hope, I'm all for it.

Greg, you mentioned that Nancy was there for every important event in the boys' lives, but there are a lot of important events to come. Exactly. What do you hope to see? So I am going to see those boys walk across the stage at their college graduation. I am going to see them get married, and I am going to see grandkids, preferably in that order. And I know it's like such a mom bucket list, but I'll love every minute of it. The number of calls are increasing again.

This is Duke's polio team. Dr. Daryl Bignor, director of the Tisch Brain Tumor Center, molecular biologist Matthias Gromeyer, and neuro-oncologist Dr. Henry Friedman and Dr. Annick Desjardins. As is typical, the university has licensed this technology to a new company to attract research dollars to the therapy, and all the members of the team are investors. Good to see that this is going well. Dr. Friedman screens more than 1,000 glioblastoma patients a year who would like to be treated at Duke. He helps

decide who meets the criteria for the polio trial. I wonder of all the trials and all of the theories and all of the treatments that you have hoped for all of these years, how does this stack up? This, to me, is the most promising therapy I've seen in my career, period. The virus is the creation of, the obsession of, Dr. Gromeyer, who has been laboring over this for more than 25 years, the last 15 at Duke. When you went to your colleagues and said, I've got it, we'll use the polio virus to kill cancer, what did they say? Well, I got a range of responses from crazy to you're lying, to all kinds of things. Most people thought it just was too dangerous. I thought he was nuts.

I mean, I really thought that what he's using is a weapon that produces paralysis. Other researchers are experimenting with cancer treatments using viruses including HIV, smallpox, and measles. But polio was Dr. Gromeyer's choice because as luck would have it, it seeks out and attaches to a receptor that is found on the surface of the cells that make up nearly every kind of solid tumor. It's almost as if polio had evolved for the purpose. Gromeyer re-engineered the virus, removing a key genetic sequence. The virus can't survive this way, so he repaired the damage with a harmless bit of cold virus. This new modified polio virus can't cause paralysis or death because it can't reproduce in normal cells.

But in cancer cells, it does. And in the process of replicating, it releases toxins that poison the cell. At least, that's what they'd observed in the laboratory. Eventually, they had to try it in a human being. It's a hell of a thing to be told that you have months to live when you're 20 years old. In 2011, Stephanie Lipscomb was a nursing student with headaches. A doctor told her she had this glioblastoma tumor the size of a tennis ball. I looked at the nurse that was sitting there holding my hand, and I said, I don't understand. What did he just say?

It's kind of hard for me to process. You had 98% of the tumor removed. Exactly. As much radiation as you can have in a lifetime and chemotherapy. Exactly. And then in 2012, what did the doctors tell you? Your cancer's back. With recurrent glioblastoma, there were no options, except the one that had never been tried.

Did they tell you that it had never been tried in a human being before? They did. But at the same time, I had nothing to lose, honestly. Her polio treatment began in 2012, and from the very beginning, it looked like a bad bet. So we treated there in May. Then in July, the tumor looked bigger, looked really inflamed. I got really concerned, got really worried. You thought this wasn't working. I thought it wasn't working. Neuro-oncologist Annick Desjardins wanted to abandon the polio experiment

and return to traditional treatment, but Stephanie said no. Five months after her infusion, an MRI showed the tumor only looked worse because of inflammation caused by Stephanie's immune system, which had awakened to the cancer for the first time and gone to war. Why didn't the immune system react to the cancer to begin with? So cancers, all human cancers, they develop a shield or shroud of protective measures that make them invisible to the immune system. And this is precisely what we try to reverse with our virus. So by infecting the tumor we are actually removing this protective shield and enabling the immune system to come in and attack. So essentially what's happening here inside the tumor is you have a polio infection.

Yes. And that sets off an alarm for the immune system. The immune system says there's a polio infection, we better go kill it. Exactly. And it turns out it's the tumor. Yes. It appears the polio starts the killing, but the immune system does most of the damage. Stephanie's tumor shrank for 21 months until it was gone. Three years after the infusion, something unimaginable had happened. This is from an MRI in August 2014. And there's no cancer in this picture at all?

We don't see any cancer, active cancer cells. She is cancer-free. All that remains is this hole from an early surgery. How surprised are you by that? I'm surprised because you never expect on a Phase one study in particular to have these kind of results. You're not expecting to cure people in a phase one trial. You're not even necessarily expecting to help them. You hope so, but that's not the design of a phase one study. It's designed to get the right dose. When you get anything on top of that, it's cake. Quite a cake. Quite a cake. Biggest cake we've seen in a long, long time. Dr. Fritz Anderson showed us the results in another patient, himself. He's a retired cardiologist, and at age 70, he

became the second person in the polio trial. This is a fairly sizable temporal tumor, which means that we see right here. On the left is his tumor before treatment. On the right, a hairline scar where it used to be. That was nearly three years ago. Do you consider yourself cured, or do you call it remission? I feel it as a cure, and I live my life that way. After the early successes, the next patients would receive a higher dose. That's the whole idea behind a phase one trial, to increase the dose in succeeding patients step by step in search of the highest dose that is still safe. We believe in the philosophy we've learned in chemotherapy that more is better.

So if we were getting a good response at dose level 1 or dose level 2, then go to dose level 3, 4, 5. Sixty-year-old Donna Clegg was a social worker from Idaho. We met her in 2014, puffy from the steroids used to reduce the swelling in her brain. I want to be able to live. So that's kind of how I feel that this is going to be my opportunity to have a full life. Donna's polio infusion was three times more potent than the one that had worked for Stephanie. But in her case, this higher dose set off an immune response that was much too powerful. Donna battled the inflammation for nine months before she died in March 2015. Donna Clegg suffered quite a lot, and I wonder how that weighs on your mind.

Every patient who has an outcome that is not positive weighs on my mind. I think that when you're doing a phase one study, you know that these things can happen, but she is a patient who really did not derive benefit and yet taught us something important. You discovered that putting in too much polio virus created too large an immune response. Absolutely. After that hard lesson, doctors cut the potency of Nancy Justice's dose by 85 percent. It was less than they had ever expected to use. They called this new dose, dose minus one. But even so, four and a half months after her infusion in March 2015,

inflammation had caused the mass in Nancy's brain to double in size. But to Dr. Desjardins, the tumor looked weaker. And in this image, it's shot through full of holes. It's shot through full of holes. And let me show you the next picture and you'll see it's even more and more holes. So where does this go from here? So now we keep following her and hopefully keeps shrinking and it keeps collapsing. And that's what we have seen with Fritz and Stephanie, that it continued shrinking for years. Nancy, when you look at this, what do you think? Oh, it's amazing. Oh my gosh. I mean, thank you, Lord. And these doctors, you know, and to just see this, you know, that's life.

Nancy Justice faces a hard road ahead. But along the way, new discoveries will take the researchers in a direction they never imagined. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. 38 patients have volunteered for Duke University's experiment

to use the poliovirus to kill glioblastoma, the most efficient, relentless cancer of the brain. The FDA's decision to grant Duke breakthrough status means the second phase of the trial will be expanded to about 40 institutions with hundreds of patients. If that goes well, Duke will be allowed to skip the third phase of the trial and make polio therapy for glioblastoma available to all. The route to this achievement was not a straight line. The first volunteers saw their tumors disappear, but later patients suffered crippling setbacks.

There was a way forward, but researchers found themselves on a path they had not imagined. Their guide through the mystery was a patient named Brendan Steele. Riley and Connor from Mom and Dad. On Christmas Eve 2009, Brendan Steele could not know how precious the gift of life would be. At 37, he was an IT manager in Montana, a husband and father of three. But then, doctors found glioblastoma and gave him 11 months to say goodbye.

When surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy failed, Brendan volunteered for Duke's polio trial. And in 2013, he received the six-hour poliovirus infusion. But in removing the catheter, a blood vessel was severed. His wife, Kathy, was by his side. Brennan said, it's weird, and he goes to hold his head, and weird just kind of pulled, drained out, like that was the end of his speech. You understood how bad off you were? No. No? No, because I don't remember. Emergency surgery stopped the bleeding, but the trauma left Brendan barely able to walk or talk. Seven months later, a biopsy revealed that his tumor was growing. Doctors gave Brendan chemotherapy.

It had failed him before, but it might give him just a few more weeks. Neuro-oncologist, Annick Desjardins, did not imagine what happened next. We gave him one dose of chemotherapy and the lesion just melted, went away rapidly, which we don't see that happen normally. Two months after that single dose of chemo, the tumor, the white mass on the right, started to break up.

Brendan continued the chemotherapy, and in eight months, it was gone. And what do the doctors tell you about your cancer today? No cancer. No cancer. Recurrent glioblastoma. And now they tell you they cannot find it in your brain. Yep.

Brendan Steele has lived 35 months since his polio infusion. He's been cancer-free for 19. Dr. Henry Friedman, deputy director of Duke's Cancer Center, has a theory about why the chemo worked this time when it never had before. Shockingly, chemotherapy in patients who have previously failed it, once they've had the poliovirus therapy, now seem to have a new, enhanced, almost extraordinary response to the chemotherapy, as if the poliovirus has set up the tumor to be more responsive to chemotherapy. That was a surprise? That was a surprise. And for us to

see this, it was a stunning observation that is actually the platform for a future study that will involve chemotherapy and the poliovirus. The discovery changed their approach to Nancy Justice. You'll remember when we last saw Nancy in March 2015, Dr. Desjardins saw signs her tumor was breaking up. But in the months that followed, the inflammation kept growing. As Nancy's brain compressed, she was losing the connections to her arm, her legs, and her relationship to the very space around her. And touch your nose. Here. To your nose. Yeah, to your nose. Okay. Whatever part of the brain involves the will to fight appeared to be unaffected. Now, would a single dose of chemotherapy have the same miraculous result as it did for Brendan Steele. Dr. Desjardins

reached for their new discovery and within two months, the mass was shrinking. See how the folds of the brain are back when they were all squished shut? Oh, wow. The ventricle is reopening. Oh, look at that. Hallelujah. Now that's what we're looking for, honey. How did you feel at that time? Oh, loved it, loved. I mean, that's what we'd been working for, praying for. Tumor's getting smaller and smaller.

Somebody had taken a racer to it. As the inflammation retreated, there was new space for hope. Up, up, up, up, up, elbow straight, elbow straight. Look at the speed, honey. Nancy found strength. Yes. And buoyed always by her husband, Greg, she walked up to a mile a day.

Nancy's life was covering a distance of time denied to glioblastoma patients. But last February, 15 months after her infusion of polio, her run met another hurdle. Just a little more inflammation. The day her journey began, she told us she would see her sons graduate, be married, and have children. In that order, she joked. Now, determination was nuanced with gratitude for what she'd had already. Nancy, when we met you the first time,

I asked you about your mom bucket list. How are those weddings and grandkids looking to you now? Okay, so right now, I'm thinking, it's just the simple things right now that I enjoy. Seven weeks after that interview, in late March, Nancy was rushed back to Duke. The light that never dimmed was in her eyes, but her words were gone. This is what she was fighting. The inflammation engulfed half her brain. I just think we need to know what we're dealing with so we can move. Neurosurgeon Alan Friedman needed to find out if the mass was a buildup of dead cells from the immune response or active cancer.

He slipped a needle into her brain to extract a bit of tissue. Thank you. See you there in a second. The tissue was rushed to the pathology lab where a microscope discovered dead cells where the polio was working but also regrowth of the tumor glioblastoma had found a way back 17 months after we first met Nancy doctors Alan Friedman and anik Desjardins explained to Greg that Nancy's tumor had now infiltrated parts of her brain responsible for breathing and cognition. She's getting worse, and maybe it's a time where we cannot do anything anymore to help her, and we need to let her go.

And we love you, you know that, right? We wondered whether Greg would do it all again. Definitely, we would do it. Nancy would have been gone long ago. And I think it's given us some good time. And we appreciate that. On April 6th, Nancy Justice, medical explorer, passed away at the age of 60. She'd had nine more months than she could have expected.

What did Nancy teach you? From the treatment standpoint, what she taught us is two different things. So clearly, the combination of the polio virus with the chemotherapy had at first an amazing response. We need to understand that. The next thing is, at some point, though, it stopped working. at first an amazing response. We need to understand that. The next thing is, at some point, though, it stopped working. And why did that happen?

What the Duke team has learned is that inflammation is an unavoidable consequence of the immune system's attack in most patients, and that managing it with drugs will likely be a key to survival. So far there have been 21 patients at this lowest dose, minus one. Eight of them have died. Put that in perspective for me. All the ones who haven't died on a phase one trial is simply remarkable. To see positive results

in terms of controlling a tumor or shrinking a tumor in patients with recurrent disease on a phase one trial is remarkable. It's not your goal. It's not your expectation. But it certainly is something that when you see it, you say, this is really terrific. This is special.

Apparently, the FDA saw something special, too. Breakthrough status was granted after data showed that patients who'd been living an average of 10 months were living an average of 15 months. And three patients showed no sign of cancer at all after three years. Dr. Darrell Bignor, who runs Duke's Brain Tumor Center, has fought glioblastoma for 50 years. When you talk of median survival being extended from 10 months to 15 months, for some of these patients, it's 15 months and counting. Yes. They're still living.

Yes. Yes. And we still have got significant periods of high quality survival. And that is a huge difference. And then we have patients like Stephanie Fritz and Brandon that are leading virtually normal lives I mean they probably go many days without even thinking about having had a glioblastoma which is just amazing you were in medical school thinking about one day being able to beat glioblastoma, and now you are standing on this doorstep. What does that mean to you personally? It's an enormous feeling, and I have to be very careful. I never want to give anyone false hope, but I see all of the science coming together now and I know it's going to happen. I've never felt that way until now.

And in an amazing new development, this science may be coming together for an entire range of cancers. In the laboratory, Duke has used polio to kill cancer cells of the skin, pancreas, stomach, lung, colon, and prostate. Immunologist Dr. Smita Nair showed us what polio did to breast cancer in mice. DR. This is breast cancer tissue. And what we find is, if you look at this, is here is a tumor that got injected with polio virus is here is a tumor that got injected with polio virus here's a tumor that got injected with just saline and the difference in the tumor size is extremely visible here night and day we kept seeing this so we went back and asked the question what is happening in

the tumors and we tease these tumors apart, and what we found were a lot of T cells in the tumor. Immune system cells. Immune system cells. Dr. Nair has filmed immune system T cells, shown here in color, breaking apart a tumor cell. What you see took a little over one hour. This leads Dr. Nair and others to a fascinating possibility. Once immune cells are programmed to recognize a cancer,

will they remember and attack that cancer everywhere in the body for a lifetime? If you get a tumor again, these are memory T-cells, they will remember that and they can eliminate a recurrent or a metastatic tumor. How long does it take typically to get from this mouth stage into a human trial? I would say anything between three to five years. It takes some time. Well, go back to work and stop talking to me. That's what I will do.

That's what I think I should do. Remember two months ago you couldn't lift that heel. There is much left to learn. Why do some patients suffer and die while others given months to live appear to have a complete recovery? Three years after his polio treatment, Brendan Steele remains cancer free

and he's determined to overcome the damage from his surgery, a conviction that he keeps within arm's length. It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up. Great words to live by. Yeah, yeah. I remind myself every day, get up, get up. Four years after his polio therapy,

73-year-old Fritz Andersen is traveling the world with his wife. I'm alive because of it. If I hadn't received it, I don't think I would be here today. And Stephanie Lipscomb, patient number one in the clinical trial four years ago, has now become a nurse. Do you remember me coming in this morning? I know you're lazy. Yes, I did. Yes. You told us before that being a cancer patient

would probably make you a better nurse. And I wonder, has it? Oh, yes. To talk to my patients and tell them, look, I've been in the hospital. I've been sick like this. I can just see the hope in their eyes. Where do you want to take your nursing career? Pediatric oncology. Kids with cancer? Yes, sir. Because I was 20 when I was diagnosed,

I wasn't really completely an adult. And I absolutely love kids with this unique experience of surviving stage four cancer in my brain. If I don't do this, then it's kind of like a waste, a waste of being cancer-free. You think you survived for a reason? Oh, yes, most definitely. This past January on 60 Minutes, we reported a story about espionage orchestrated by China to rip off American trade secrets and intellectual property. The Justice Department considers it a national security emergency, costing our economy hundreds of billions of dollars.

Three years ago, the U.S. government launched a new strategy to fight back with more aggressive investigations and a greater number of prosecutions. We have discovered the dragnet isn't just catching Chinese spies. It's ensnaring a growing number of Americans who aren't spies at all. It was so urgent, the pounding was so urgent that I ran here to open the door without even being fully dressed. Last May, the FBI paid an early morning visit to scientist Shaoxing Shi at his home in suburban Philadelphia. So I open the door, and so I see a lot of people outside.

They have on bulletproof vests? Yes, they did, yeah, and with guns. Shi is chair of the Temple University Physics Department, but the FBI was convinced he was a spy passing high-tech American secrets to China. He was stunned when agents burst in and handcuffed him. Did you have any idea what was going on, why they were here? No, I had absolutely no idea.

So the very first thing that went through my mind was, this must be a mistake. Shi couldn't believe this was happening to him in the U.S. He was born in China and raised during the Cultural Revolution, a time when families feared an unexpected knock on the door. His father, a lawyer, was taken away to a forced labor camp. As an adult, Shi came to the U.S. to live and work in a free country. Why did you become an American citizen? My children were born in this country. My home is in this country. My career is in this country. So it's just feel natural that I should become a citizen.

Xi established himself as a world leader in the study of superconductors that could help improve MRIs. He managed nine government research projects and more than a million dollars in federal funding. So this is your lab? Yes, this is one of your labs. One of my labs, yes. The arrest had a swift impact. Temple told him to stay home. He was removed as the principal investigator of his own research. What's going through your mind? So I was saying to myself, they're going to put me in jail. And all these things that I've been working for years was coming to an end.

So tell me about the day you were arrested. My life was turned upside down. Sherry Chen's life was also turned upside down when federal prosecutors suspected her of spying for China. She's been a U.S. citizen for 19 years and has devoted her career to public service as a flood forecaster in the state of Missouri and most recently with the National Weather Service in Ohio. You were proud of your work. Yeah, I do. I really put my heart into my work.

Chen showed us the award she won for helping to save the city of Cairo, Illinois, from record flooding in the spring of 2011. Armed with her forecast, the Army Corps of Engineers blew up a levee and rerouted floodwaters. What did you feel about that when Cairo was spared? I'm proud of that. My knowledge, my work can really protect the properties and saving people's lives. But three years later, Chen says FBI agents marched her out of her office in handcuffs. I saw my co-workers all looking through the windows

and watched me being taken away. I think prosecutors are feeling pressure to bring these cases. I think investigators are excited about bringing cases that may be high-profile. Attorney Peter Zeidenberg is a former federal prosecutor who represents both Xiao Xingxi and Sherry Chen. He believes both American citizens are collateral damage in the government's war against Chinese economic espionage. That fear of Chinese economic espionage, it's not unfounded. No, I'm not suggesting that it is.

What I'm suggesting is, notwithstanding that fact, before you put handcuffs on someone and take them away, that you've got to make sure that you've got your case together and that the facts add up. And in these cases? Facts didn't add up. Shao-Hsing-Shi faced a Justice Department narrative worthy of a spy thriller. Prosecutors accused him of collaborating with various government entities in China, of scheming for years to obtain revolutionary American technology,

and emailing photos and blueprints of that technology to the Chinese. Specifically, this American-made device called a pocket heater. It's used to make a superfine coating that maximizes the flow of electricity. In exchange, prosecutors said he would be showered with money, property, and prestige in China. The very first words coming out of my mouth was, that's absurd. That's really absurd. Why? It turns out the device Xi was discussing with his Chinese academic counterparts wasn't a pocket heater. It was a completely different heating device

that Xi was developing. He'd planned to share it in scientific publications. It was an earlier generation of this one. Is this in any way similar to the pocket heater that we've been talking about? Not at all. It is very different from the pocket heater. So when it comes to the science, it sounds like the federal investigators flat out got it wrong. That's correct. And then there's this. Prosecutors allege that Xi's collaboration with Chinese scientists was somehow sinister.

In reality, it was mandated by one of his grants from the National Science Foundation. So your funding was dependent on your working with Chinese scientists? Yes, yes, absolutely. So one arm of the government wants you to collaborate, and the other arm of the government says it's a crime? Indeed, indeed, yes. Yet he faced 80 years in prison. What was that like?

It put a lot of stress. And this daily stress sometimes becomes strikingly unbearable. So I remember pleading with my family let's let's try not to fold if we hold on we have the truth if we fold we will have nothing. Four months after Xi's arrest, his lawyer, Peter Zeidenberg, pointed out the inconsistencies to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Philadelphia.

Three weeks later, they dropped the case. Zeidenberg sees disturbing parallels with Sherry Chen's case. So how did she get in trouble? The story started when she went to China to visit her parents. She had a somewhat happenstance meeting with a former classmate of hers, a vice minister in the water ministry. The vice minister asked Chen how the U.S. pays for dam repairs.

Did you think there was anything, I don't know, secretive about that information? It never crossed my mind. It's not secret. When Chen got back to Ohio, she asked her boss for publicly available information, which she did send to her former classmate. She also searched this government database. Since she wasn't a regular user, Chen borrowed a password from her colleague. Sharing passwords was common in the office. She never sent information from the database to China, but federal prosecutors charged Chen with illegally accessing and stealing restricted information.

Prosecutors also charged her with lying about the password. Chen initially denied that a colleague had emailed it to her, but she remembered after investigators showed her the email. Her colleague, Ray Davis, initially forgot too. He wasn't charged with misremembering or failing to remember giving her the password. He only remembered it when they showed him the email and he said, literally, oh God, that was almost a year ago. I forgot all about that. Wasn't that Sherry's reaction as well? It was. Why the disparate reactions from the government? You know, the fact is Sherry Chen is a Chinese-American, and her colleague was Caucasian. And with Sherry, everything she did, they looked at as somehow nefarious or somehow corrupt.

You say it was forgetfulness, and they say it's a lie. Yeah, but to others, it's normal. You can forget something. For others, it's normal. You can forget something. For me, it's a crime. Chen faced 40 years in prison for lying about the password and accessing the database. The week before the trial, Zeidenberg took his case to Carter Stewart, who was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio. The next day, Stewart dropped the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio. The next day, Stewart dropped the charges.

We found since 2012, the Justice Department has won convictions in 14 cases related to Chinese economic espionage. It lost one case at trial. Charges were dropped against five Chinese-born scientists, all American citizens. The fact that they will suspect us stealing secret for China is very offensive. We're American.

More than 40 members of Congress have called on the Justice Department to conduct an independent investigation of whether Xi and Chen were targeted because of race. The Justice Department wouldn't speak to us on camera, but in a statement said, we investigate and prosecute individuals based on known or suspected criminal activities or threats to national security, not based on race, ethnicity, or national origin.

Chinese theft of American trade secrets is a real problem. Excuse me, can I help you? The FBI made this video to alert agents, prosecutors, and the public. The agency says it's based on real events. Go, go! There are a ton of ways the government can come at you. It's all having a chilling effect. Some of the most prominent Chinese Americans are holding seminars around the country

to caution scientists that activities they consider innocent could look like espionage. If you're going to take something and give it as part of a talk at Beijing University or something, you've got to think twice because some people might look at that as being nefarious. This past March, a year after her case was dropped, Sherry Chen was fired from her job for untrustworthiness, lack of candor, and other issues stemming from her criminal investigation. So why won't the National Weather Service give you your job back? I don't know.

I'm a dedicated worker. I didn't do anything wrong. And I love my job. In an email, her employer said the facts fully support the action taken in this case. Chen has appealed. After spending about $200,000 to clear his name, Shaoxing Shi was welcomed back at Temple University, though he'll no longer serve as chair of the physics department.

He worries that lingering suspicions could jeopardize future government funding, the lifeblood of his work. Do you think the U.S. government owes you an apology? I do think so. I didn't do anything wrong, but my family and myself had to go through this. I think we deserve some kind of apology.

And you know, it's not over, right? The scars from this traumatic experience is so deep that it's going to be with us for the rest of our life. After its experience with Professor Shi and Sherry Chen, the Justice Department tightened up its oversight and made explicit that every espionage case must be approved and supervised by headquarters in Washington.