Short Wave - Harvard Professor's Arrest Raises Questions About Scientific Openness

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

Harvard chemist Charles Lieber was arrested in January on charges he lied about funding he received from China. Some say the case points to larger issues around scientific collaboration in an era of geopolitical rivalry, as well as the racial profiling of scientists. Email the show at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, everybody. Maddie Safaya here with NPR senior science correspondent, Jeff Brumfield. And we brought you here, Jeff, to talk about the U.S. government's efforts to prevent China from stealing American technology. Yeah, and there's one case going on right now that's really interesting. It involves a guy named Charles Lieber. He's the chair of Harvard's chemistry department, one of the world's leading researchers in the field of nanotechnology. And now the target of a major government investigation. This is taped from a press conference by federal officials in Boston, announcing the arrest of Lieber in late January.

When questioned, Lieber hid his involvement with the Chinese entities. Prosecutors alleged that he took money from the Chinese government without disclosing it properly to the American government. It appears that China paid Lieber hundreds of thousands of dollars. Liber was also receiving millions of dollars from U.S. agencies like the National Institutes of Health. and the Department of Defense. And he allegedly lied about getting money from China. That's what's got him in real trouble. This case and some others like it involving ethnically Chinese scientists

raise a lot of questions about the fear of espionage, the nature of scientific collaboration, and racial profiling. So today in the show, the case of Dr. Charles Lieber, and what it says about science in an era of geopolitical tension. Okay, so Jeff. Where do we begin? Well, I'd actually like to start not with the Lieber case, but with another case. So I think we'll tell us a lot about this latest one.

All right. Lay it on me. Let's go. So it's May of 2015, and a researcher named Xi Xiaoxing is at his home near Philadelphia. She is a physicist at Temple University who studies superconductivity, basically special materials that can sometimes let electricity flow through them with no resistance. There's a ton of applications for it. And all of a sudden, there's a knock at his door. It's a very, very loud and urgent.

So I ran to open the door and just saw all these armed agents outside and pointing their guns to my wife and daughters. And they took me out in handcuffs. And I had absolutely no idea why. Wow. Okay. So why was he arrested? Like, what was going on? Well, the U.S. government accused him of sharing a special piece of equipment with researchers in China.

But here's the thing, he didn't do it. Prosecutors were confused because, well, it turns out superconducting technology is just really complicated. But what about the idea that he was helping the Chinese develop superconducting technology just in general? Well, Dr. Xi says, sure, he works with scientists in China all the time. And sometimes he spent summers over there doing research with them. But as you know, Maddie, one of the basic pillars of fundamental research is openness. Nothing he shared was classified or restricted in any way. Academic espionage, it's a contradiction.

Everything we are doing is fundamental research. There's nothing to steal. They can just sit there and read your paper. And sure enough, about six months after this whole thing starts, the charges are dropped against Dr. Shee. The government admits he's done absolutely nothing wrong. I mean, honestly, it sounds like he just had collaborators, which is like a major thing in science.

unless there was some weird money thing being exchanged or going on, this is what scientists do. Yeah, I mean, there are technologies that are restricted, for example, stuff to do with rockets that could be used in missile developments, say. The government has very strict rules about sharing that kind of information. But generally, science is open and collaborations happen all over the world. The thing is, China is getting a lot more scrutiny these days. So fast forward to 2018. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is really concerned about the theft of scientific knowledge and intellectual property by the Chinese. So the Justice Department launches what it calls its China Initiative.

The goal is to crack down on the transfer of U.S. knowledge to China. And in the academic community, the focus falls really quickly on one program in particular. It's called the Thousand Talents Plan. So our understanding is that originally the purpose of the Thousand Talents program was to, reverse the brain drain. That's Michael Lauer. He's deputy director of extramural research at the National Institutes of Health, and he's the main guy at NIH dealing with thousand talents. When he says brain drain, an example of that is like scientists go abroad to study and then end up staying in whatever country instead of coming back home. Exactly. The Chinese government

wanted to bring back outstanding scientists to China so as to develop their science and technology. And the way the Chinese government does it is by offering money. So researchers set up labs in China and they spend at least part of their year over there doing their work in exchange for grants and expenses paid. And the program grew pretty quickly to include non-Chinese scientists as well. Right. And I think there are these kinds of programs in other countries, too. Yeah, it's not uncommon. Canada had something called the 150 research chairs. I mean, that's kind of the less ambitious Canadian equipment. shall we say? Yeah. But look, what Lauer says is the Thousand Talents program has gone too far. And the real problem from his perspective is that in a number of cases, researchers are not telling their home universities or the U.S. government, for that matter, about their Chinese funding. And not disclosing that Chinese funding. That's what's actually against the law. Exactly. The types of behaviors that we are seeing are not subtle or minor violations. What we're seeing, is really quite egregious. And that brings us back to Charles Lieber, the Harvard chemist we were talking about earlier,

who was arrested back in January. The complaint alleges that Dr. Lieber signed a contract with the Chinese University in Wuhan and was paid up to $50,000 per month, plus up to $158,000 in living expenses and awarded more than $1.5 million to set up a research lab at the Chinese school and work there on researching nanotechnology. That is a lot of money, Jeff. That is like 10 postdocs full of money at least. I love that your brain calculates prices and postdocs.

I mean? But the bottom line is it is a lot of money. And the criminal complaint alleges not only did he get all this money, but Lieber lied about being part of the program, to Harvard, to the NIH and the Department of Defense, which together were also giving him many millions of dollars some research money. I should say Lieber's attorneys declined to comment about this case. They didn't want to speak to me. But Mike Lauer from the NIH says there's a larger pattern here. Other scientists have

done the same, and it's a real problem. Collaboration does not involve offshore bank accounts. Collaboration does not involve undisclosed cash payments. It does not involve undisclosed employment agreements or undisclosed contracts. It does not involve double dipping, where a person is being paid salary to work in China and to work in the United States at the same time. Several scientists and other institutions have been fired over this. He says the NIH is currently investigating around 180 other scientists. He thinks this is a systemic problem. So if these cases involve lying, failing to disclose information, which we do know is against the law, why are scientists doing this? It's a really interesting question, and I don't have a great answer. As I said, Lieber's attorneys have declined to speak to me. In other cases, other scientists who've been fired don't talk to the press generally. Now, Lauer says in some cases, the Thousand Talents contracts the scientists sign actually come with a non-disclosure agreement. So they're actually told by the Chinese not to say anything, which is illegal. But there's also more going on. I mean,

And it may be that in some cases they fear if they disclose money from the Chinese, they are going to get more scrutiny on their work. And then something else to consider is the possibility of just plain old greed. The criminal complaint against Charles Lieber alleges, and I should say alleges here, that he was receiving cash payments from the Chinese. Some of this money was just coming as straight up cash. Okay. So this sounds problematic, for sure. but is it espionage? Maybe I have like an outdated old-timey spy version of espionage, but it doesn't necessarily feel like that to me. No, I mean, it isn't really espionage. I think it's really important to say that Lieber isn't technically being accused of espionage by the government.

This is about the money. And I think it's very telling the U.S. government's going after the money rather than transfers of technology. Like you remember that superconducting case earlier. It's really hard to tell if someone, doing something illegal when they're collaborating scientifically. And that's also got some people wondering whether these sorts of cases really deserve criminal treatment. So Frank Wu is somebody I spoke to. He's a professor at the University of California Hastings College of Law. And he tracks these espionage cases and says arresting people for issues around what they disclose for their grants, it just feels heavy-handed to him. So in the past, if there was a problem, somebody would talk to you.

Maybe you would face some discipline from your employer. But you wouldn't face being fired and going to prison and having your name dragged through the mud as a spy. In fact, the same day Lieber was arrested, the Justice Department announced the arrest of two Chinese nationals. They say had lied on visa applications and illegally transferred biological samples. These aren't exactly the same kind of case, but, you know, it's the same general flavor. It sounds like a lot of people who have been accused are Chinese nationals or ethnically Chinese. Does Wu think that racism plays a role in this? Well, Wu admits there are some real espionage cases that involve Chinese people and they have been convicted.

But there's sort of a larger tone around all this that sounds very familiar to him. No matter how assimilated you are, no matter how much you think to yourself, I'm an American just like any other American, When you're of Chinese background, there's that risk always that people will look at you and suspect you're actually a communist agent. Now, I should say U.S. officials categorically denied this is anything to do with race. I interviewed Andrew Lelling, the federal prosecutor, who arrested Lieber, and he said this. If it was the French government that was attempting to steal U.S. technology in a massive decade-long campaign, we'd look for French people. But it's not. It's the Chinese government. And he actually points to the Lieber case as an example of how they're willing to prosecute anyone they think has broken the law by lying.

But even if the government doesn't think it's racial profiling, it's definitely having an effect on the Chinese research community. You remember Xi Xia Xing, the researcher who was falsely accused that we talked about. Well, I asked him, does he still work with colleagues in China? The short answer is yes. But the more, a longer answer is that my research now is much, much smaller than he used to be. And that's because he doesn't want to apply for federal grants anymore. He's afraid he'll do something wrong. So every time, you know, when I do all this conflict of interest form or I do all this,

in the grant applications and check boxes and so on and so forth, I shake. So I shake. I am scared. that if anything I didn't do exactly correctly, accurately, I could be in trouble. So at least for Dr. Shee, regardless of whether or not the U.S. government says this has anything to do with race, this has already had a big impact on his life. Oh, yeah. I mean, he feels like this is profiling and he's under the microscope. And that could end up being a big problem.

Remember, this effort by the U.S. government, this is really about preserving leadership over China. But a big part of that leadership comes from the work of many thousands of ethnically Chinese researchers and students here in the U.S. The vast, vast majority of these scientists, they're all playing by the rules. And I think critics of the government's forceful response worry that alienating these scientists could ultimately cost the U.S. more than whatever issues there are surrounding China's Thousand Talents Plan. This episode was produced by Britt Hansen, edited by Viet Leigh and fact-checked by Emily Vaughn. I'm Maddie Safaya.

Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.