American Quislings

Harvard scientist lied about academic, financial ties with Chinese
Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, lied about contacts with a Chinese state-run initiative that seeks to draw foreign-educated talent.

By Ellen Barry

Charles M. Lieber at an award ceremony in Jerusalem in 2012.

BOSTON — Early Tuesday morning, F.B.I. agents arrived at two of the most protected corners of Harvard University’s academic cloister, raking through a gabled house in the suburb of Lexington and a neoclassical brick building in Cambridge.
By afternoon, one of Harvard’s scientific luminaries was in handcuffs, charged with making a false statement to federal authorities about his financial relationship with the Chinese government, and especially his participation in its Thousand Talents program, a campaign to attract foreign-educated scientists to China.

The arrest of Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, signaled a new, aggressive phase in the Justice Department’s campaign to root out scientists who are stealing research from American laboratories.

For months, news has been trickling out about the prosecution of scientists, mainly Chinese graduate students and researchers working in American laboratories. 

But Lieber represents a different kind of target, a star researcher who had risen to the highest reaches of the American academic hierarchy.

Lieber, a leader in the field of nanoscale electronics, has not been accused of sharing sensitive information with Chinese officials, but rather of hiding — from Harvard, from the National Institutes of Health and from the Defense Department — the amount of money that Chinese funders were paying him.
Lieber’s lawyer, Peter Levitt, made no comment after a preliminary hearing in federal court in Boston on Tuesday.
His arrest sent shock waves through research circles.
“This is a very, very highly esteemed, highly regarded investigator working at Harvard, a major U.S. institution, at the highest rank he could have, so, all the success you can have in this sphere,” said Ross McKinney Jr., chief scientific officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges. 

“It’s like, when you’ve got it all, why do you want more?”
McKinney described anxiety among his colleagues that scientists will be scrutinized over illegitimate sources of international funding.
“We worry that, slowly but surely, we’re going to be criminally charged. This is a big deal. We all could end up in jail.”

Lieber, 60, was charged with one count of making a false or misleading statement, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. 

He appeared in court on Tuesday wearing the outfit he had put on to head to his office at Harvard: a Brooks Brothers polo shirt, cargo pants and hiking boots. 

He appeared subdued as he flipped through the charge sheet. 

Levitt, his lawyer, said it was his first opportunity to read the charge against him.
Harvard said Lieber had been placed on indefinite administrative leave.“The charges brought by the U.S. government against Lieber are extremely serious,” said Jonathan Swain, a spokesman for the university. 

“Harvard is cooperating with federal authorities, including the National Institutes of Health, and is initiating its own review of the misconduct.”
Lieber was one of three scientists to be charged with crimes on Tuesday.

Harvard Chinese criminals

Zaosong Zheng, a Harvard-affiliated cancer researcher was caught leaving the country with 21 vials of cells stolen from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, according to the authorities. 

He had admitted that he had planned to turbocharge his career by publishing the research in China under his own name. 

He was charged with smuggling goods from the United States and with making false statements, and was being held without bail in Massachusetts after a judge determined that he was a flight risk. 

His lawyer has not responded to a request for comment.

The third was Yanqing Ye, who had been conducting research at Boston University’s department of physics, chemistry and biomedical engineering until last spring, when she returned to China. 

She hid the fact that she was a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army, and continued to carry out assignments from Chinese military officers while at B.U.
Yanqing was charged with visa fraud, making false statements, acting as an agent of a foreign government and conspiracy.

She was in China and was not arrested.
Prosecutors made it clear that the charges announced on Tuesday were part of a bigger crackdown on researchers working with the Chinese government.
“No country poses a greater, more severe or long-term threat to our national security and economic prosperity than China,” said Joseph Bonavolonta, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Boston field office. 

“China’s communists’s goal, simply put, is to replace the U.S. as the world superpower, and they are breaking the law to get there.”
He called Massachusetts, with its cluster of elite universities and research institutions, “a target-rich environment.”

Charging documents in the case describe Lieber’s growing commitments in China, and efforts to hide them from his employers in the United States.
In 2011, the documents say, he signed an agreement to become a “strategic scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology in China, entitling him to a $50,000 monthly salary, $150,000 in annual in living expenses and more than $1.5 million for a second laboratory in Wuhan. 

In 2013, he celebrated the founding of a joint laboratory, the WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory.
He was informed in 2012 that he had been selected to participate in the Thousand Talents plan, the China-run program.
In 2015, Harvard officials discovered that Lieber was leading a laboratory at Wuhan University, and informed him that the use of Harvard’s name and logo was a violation of university policy. 

Lieber then distanced himself from the project, but continued to receive payment.Then in 2017 he was named a university professor, Harvard’s highest faculty rank, one of only 26 professors to hold that status. 

The same year, he earned the N.I.H. Director’s Pioneer Award for inventing syringe-injectable mesh electronics that can integrate with the brain.
Investigators from the Defense Department — which had extended $8 million in grants to Lieber — began questioning him in 2018 about secondary sources of income, prosecutors said.
Lieber told them that he was aware of China’s Thousand Talents program, but had never been invited to participate, prosecution documents say. 

Two days after that conversation, the documents say, Lieber asked a laboratory associate to help him identify web pages in which he was named as the head of the Chinese lab.
“I lost a lot of sleep worrying all of these things last night and want to start taking steps to correct sooner than later,” he wrote in an email to a research colleague that was cited by prosecutors. 

“I will be careful about what I discuss with Harvard University, and none of this will be shared with government investigators at this time.”
Last year, Harvard was required to submit a detailed report about Lieber to N.I.H., which had provided $10 million in grants for his research projects. 

He told university officials that he had “no formal association” with the Wuhan University of Technology, prosecutors said, and that he “is not and has never been” a participant in the Thousand Talents program.The campaign to scrutinize scientists’ foreign funding is a relatively new one.
Late in 2018, Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, announced that the United States was “standing up to the deliberate, systematic and calculated threats posed, in particular, by the communist regime in China.”
As a result, researchers are adjusting to a higher level of scrutiny about foreign funding than they faced in the past, said Derek Adams, a former federal prosecutor who specialized in civil fraud.
“The problem here, in my view, is that in 2018 there was a material change in the way the F.B.I. and the agencies were approaching this issue,” said Adams, now a partner in the law firm Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell.
In many cases, he said, “they’re looking at conduct that occurred many years ago. For an individual that may have had an obligation to disclose, it may not have been front at center at that time.”
Frank Wu, a law professor and former president of the Committee of 100, an organization of communist Chinese-Americans, has criticized the recent prosecutions as “potentially devastating to American science, because the number of people who have some connection to China is so vast.” Until recently, he said, such collaborations were considered healthy.
“These rules are new rules,” he said.

Chinese Integrity: Scientist Accused of Smuggling Lab Samples

Zaosong Zheng, a cancer researcher, confessed that he had planned to take the stolen samples to China's Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital
By Ellen Barry
An entrance to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, in 2014. Zaosong Zheng was a cancer researcher there recently.

BOSTON — Zaosong Zheng was preparing to board Hainan Airlines Flight 482, nonstop from Boston to Beijing, when customs officers pulled him aside.
Inside his checked luggage, wrapped in a plastic bag and then inserted into a sock, the officers found what they were looking for: 21 vials of brown liquid — cancer cells — that the authorities say Zheng, 29, a cancer researcher, took from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Under questioning, Zheng acknowledged that he had stolen eight of the samples and had replicated 11 more based on a colleague’s research. 

When he returned to China, he said, he would take the samples to Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital and turbocharge his career by publishing the results in China, under his own name.
Zheng’s arrest on Dec. 10 signified an escalation in the F.B.I.’s efforts to root out Chinese scientists who are stealing research from American laboratories. 

Federal prosecutors warn that he may be charged with transporting stolen goods or with the theft of trade secrets, a felony that brings a prison term of up to 10 years.
At a hearing on Monday, Magistrate Judge David Hennessy granted prosecutors’ wish to hold Zheng without bail, noting that the theft had the support of the Chinese government. 

Two other Chinese scientists who worked in the same lab as Zheng had successfully smuggled stolen biological material out of the country, prosecutors say.Zheng’s case is the first to unfold in the laboratories clustered around Harvard University, but it is not likely to be the last. 

Federal officials are investigating hundreds of cases involving the potential theft of intellectual property by visiting scientists, all of them Chinese nationals.Christopher Wray, director of the F.B.I., described the researchers as “nontraditional collectors” of intelligence acting at the behest of the Chinese government, part of a collective effort to “steal their way up the economic ladder at our expense.”Dr. Ross McKinney Jr., chief scientific officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, said the actions Zheng was accused of were especially bold.
“This is one of the cases where there’s been stealing of physical material as well as the stealing of ideas,” he said. 

“It’s an escalation over most of what we’ve been seeing.”Chinese researchers make up nearly half of the work force in American research laboratories, in part because American-born scientists are drawn to the private sector and less interested in academic careers, Dr. McKinney said. 

Among the 6,000 Chinese scientists who have received grants from the National Institutes of Health, around 180 are under investigation for violation of intellectual property law, he said.

Importing Chinese spies

Harvard University had sponsored Zheng’s visa starting on Sept. 4, 2018, according to Jason A. Newton, a spokesman for the university. 

The visa support ended when Zheng lost his job at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, he said.
The hospital said in a statement that it was cooperating with the investigation. 

“Any efforts to compromise research undermine the hard work of our faculty and staff to advance patient care,” said Jennifer Kritz, the hospital’s director of communication.
A message left for Brendan O. Kelley, Zheng’s lawyer, was not returned.
Court records sketch out a cat-and-mouse game between Zheng and Kara Spice, the F.B.I. special agent assigned to the case. 

Customs and Border Protection agents had been warned that he was “a high risk for exporting biological undeclared biological material,” and inspected his luggage in the airline’s bag room.
At first, Zheng deflected their interest in the 21 vials, telling the agents that they “were not important and had nothing to do with his research.” 

Then he offered another explanation, saying that they had been given to him by a friend and that he had no plans to do anything with them.
“Zheng could not explain why he was attempting to leave the United States with the vials concealed in a sock in his checked bag,” Ms. Spice’s statement says.
Shortly thereafter, he confessed to stealing the material.
Zheng booked another flight to China the following day, but was detained by F.B.I. agents before he could board it, court documents say.
Through a Mandarin interpreter, he waived his Miranda rights and told the agents he intended to use the samples for cancer research.
At that point, he was arrested.
Agents learned more when they visited Zheng’s apartment, according to court documents.
His former roommate, a fellow medical researcher named Jialin Li, told them that Zheng had packed all his possessions in preparation for his Dec. 9 flight, suggesting that he did not intend to return to the United States.
Li also told them that two other Chinese researchers, Lei Liu and Leina Mo, who had worked in the same laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, had managed to smuggle biological material into China without getting caught, according to court documents.
Zheng’s theft “was not an isolated incident,” prosecutors stated in the motion to hold him without bail.
“Rather, it appears to have been a coordinated crime, with involvement by the Chinese government, as two other Chinese working in the same lab have also stolen biological materials and smuggled them out of the United States.”