What is the truth of the American scientist's arrest?

By the end of last month, Charles Lieber lived the quiet life of an American elite scientist. His laboratory at Harvard University researched things like how to melt small electronics with the brain. In his spare time, he raised pumpkins in front of his house.

And on January 28, the FBI knocked on his door.

Lieber now faces charges of trade in knowledge of money and lies. Prosecutors claim he established a laboratory in China in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in payment from the Chinese government and then denied those payments to investigators from the US.

Lieber's lawyer, Peter Levit, refused to speak to the NPR on the charges. But others looking at the case say it raises important questions about ethics, scientific opening and possible racial profiling in an era of geopolitical tension.

This is a huge, huge case of”, says Frank Wu, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of Law, who follows Chinese spying issues. “This is a case involving US-Chinese relations. It's about competition. It's about how science should be done. ”

Lieber case focuses on a Chinese recruiting programme called The Thousands of Talent Plan. It was initiated by the Chinese government in 2008, mainly as a way to attract Chinese researchers back to China, according to Michael Lauer, deputy director of foreign research at the National Institutes of Health.

The Chinese government wanted to bring prominent scientists to China in order to develop their science and technology,” says Lauer.

In time, the program also began recruiting Western scientists. Researchers were asked to create labs in China and spend at least part of their time doing jobs there in exchange for grants and paid expenses. Some moved to China, but others shared their time between their home institutions and a Chinese university.

Such programs exist in other countries. Canada, for example, has had a 150 - chair research programme that seems similar in many ways to the Thousands of Talent Plan.

But The NIH has become aware of numerous ethical violations associated with the Chinese plan, Lauer says. Some researchers have submitted identical applications for grants like NIH and thousands of talents. Others have shared applications for confidential grants by other researchers and their associates in China. And then the money question arises: Researchers are failing to reveal the funds they receive from China for American agencies like NIH, as required by law.

The behavioral lines that we're seeing are not subtle or small violations,” says Lauer. “What we're seeing is really pretty wild. ”

Funding issues have already cost over a dozen researchers their work in institutions around the US. Lauer says the NIH is investigating about 180 other scientists, though many other participants seem to be doing their work correctly.

The audit added by research agencies like NIH has been associated with an increase in criminal prosecutions by the Department of Justice. In 2018, Prosecutor General Jeff Sessions began what he called China's Initiative, a broad programme to crack down on the transfer of US knowledge to China. So far, the initiative has filed criminal charges against dozens of people and has won several charges of spying.

These types of cases are not always direct, especially when it comes to basic research. In the spring of 2015, Xi Xiaoxing, a physicist at Temple University in Philadelphia, was arrested and charged with sharing sensitive technology with his associates in China.

It later turned out that he never did. Furthermore, he says, everything he did was already public, because finding basic research is not secret. They are published in scientific journals.

“academic anchorage is a contradiction,” says Xi. “There's nothing to steal, you can just sit there and read your letter. ”

Federal prosecutor investigating the case against Harvard chemist Charles Lieber agrees.

The entire program is to force people who are doing research in the United States to come to China, and to do the same research, offering them money,” says Andrew Lelling, U.S. Attorney for the Massachusetts District. “And this is not illegal”.

But Leling says that researchers must reveal the money they receive from their funding agencies and their university. That's partly because federal research agencies don't want to pay for the same science twice in the US and China.

Criminal complaint against Lieber claims he lied both, the government and Harvard about his involvement in the Thousands of Talent Plan. According to the complaint, Lieber was involved in the programme from at least 2012 to 2017. His contract called for salaries of up to $50,000 a month, along with around $150,000 a year for living expenses and $1.5m for the creation of a laboratory at the University of Technology in Wuhan.

Lieber set up “Common laboratory WAN-Harward Nano Key”, in complaint, without telling Harvard about it. The complaint says that when he was questioned by Harvard and by investigators from the Department of Defence who, along with NIH, gave him nearly $18m in grants, Lieber said that “was never asked to participate in the Thousands' Talent” Programme.

Lieber is not Chinese, but many of the researchers who are arrested or fired on charges received from the thousands of talent programs are Chinese or ethnic Chinese citizens. This has led some to claim that the government is profiling according to race, an accusation Leling denies.

If the French government made an effort to steal American technology in a ten-year mass campaign, we would search for French people. But it's not like that, it's the Chinese government,” he says.

But law professor Frank Wu says a recent increase in prosecution marks a major change. Until a few years ago, universities were encouraging their researchers to cooperate with China. If there was a funding issue, a researcher could face a disciplinary measure, “but you wouldn't face firing from work in prison and go to the name of being drawn to mud as a spy,” says Wu.

Wu says that he fears this new and serious response may end up in the persecution of tens of thousands of Chinese - born students and scholars. These are researchers who he believes offer the United States much more than anything China is getting through His Plan thousands of talents.

Scientific progress here, entrepreneurial progress here, has been largely promoted by Asian immigrants,” “We need the talent to want to come to these shores. ”