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U.S. Accuses Harvard Scientist of Concealing Chinese Funding U.S. Accuses Harvard Scientist of Concealing Chinese Funding
(about 7 hours later)
BOSTON — Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, was charged on Tuesday with making false statements about money he had received from a Chinese government-run program, part of a broad-ranging F.B.I. effort to root out theft of biomedical research from American laboratories. 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.
Dr. Lieber, a leader in the field of nanoscale electronics, was one of three Boston-area scientists accused on Tuesday of working on behalf of China. His case involves work with the Thousand Talents Program, a state-run program that seeks to draw talent educated in other countries. By afternoon, one of Harvard’s scientific luminaries was in handcuffs, his ankles shackled, 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.
American officials are investigating hundreds of cases of suspected theft of intellectual property by visiting scientists, nearly all of them Chinese nationals or of Chinese descent. Some are accused of obtaining patents in China based on work that is funded by the United States government, and others of setting up laboratories in China that secretly duplicated American research. 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.
Dr. Lieber, who was arrested on Tuesday, stands out among the accused scientists, because he is neither Chinese nor of Chinese descent. And as a department head at Harvard, he is widely published and more prominent than most of the other scientists who have been accused. For months, news has been trickling out about the prosecution of scientists, mainly Chinese graduate students and researchers working in American laboratories. But Dr. Lieber represents a different kind of target, a star researcher who had risen to the highest reaches of the American academic hierarchy.
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 National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award for inventing syringe-injectable mesh electronics that can integrate with the brain. Dr. 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.
Harvard’s president at the time, Drew G. Faust, called him “an extraordinary scientist whose work has transformed nanoscience and nanotechnology and has led to a remarkable range of valuable applications that improve the quality of people’s lives.” Dr. Lieber’s lawyer, Peter Levitt, made no comment after a preliminary hearing in federal court in Boston on Tuesday.
Dr. Lieber has made no secret of his work with Chinese partners, joining five senior Chinese officials and scientists in 2013 to found the WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory at the Wuhan University of Technology. His arrest sent shock waves through research circles.
Federal prosecutors said on Tuesday that Dr. Lieber made false representation to questions about his participation in the Chinese program to the United States Department of Defense. He is also charged with misrepresenting his involvement in Thousand Talents and his affiliation with Wuhan University of Technology to officials at the National Institutes of Health. “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 Dr. 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?”
According to charging documents, Dr. Lieber was paid up to $50,000 per month in salary and $150,000 per year in living expenses by Wuhan University of Technology. He was also awarded more than $1.5 million by the university and the Chinese government to build a laboratory in Wuhan. Dr. McKinney described anxiety among his colleagues that scientists will be scrutinized over legitimate sources of international funding.
Researchers are legally obligated to disclose such payments to their academic institutions. “We worry that, slowly but surely, we’re going to have something of a McCarthyish purity testing,” he said. “He’s being criminally charged. This is a big deal. He could end up in jail.”
A representative for Dr. Lieber could not immediately be reached for comment. Dr. 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. Mr. Levitt, his lawyer, said it was his first opportunity to read the charge against him.
A second person charged, Zaosong Zheng, was a Harvard-affiliated cancer researcher who prosecutors said was caught with 21 vials of cells stolen from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital. Harvard said Dr. Lieber had been placed on indefinite administrative leave.
Dr. Zheng admitted that he planned to turbocharge his career by publishing the results in China, under his own name, according to federal prosecutors. He was charged with making false statements, and is being held without bail in Massachusetts, after a judge determined that he was a flight risk. “The charges brought by the U.S. government against Professor 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 alleged misconduct.”
Yanqing Ye, who had been studying at Boston University until last spring, was also charged on Tuesday, accused of lying to authorities about her status as a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army. Ms. Ye, who was charged with visa fraud, making false statements, acting as an agent of a foreign government and conspiracy, is in China and was not arrested. Dr. Lieber was one of three scientists to be charged with crimes on Tuesday.
Launched in 2008, its Thousand Talents Program is an effort to recruit Chinese and foreign academics and entrepreneurs. According to a report in the China Daily, new recruits receive 1 million yuan, or about $146,000, from the central government, and a pledge of 10 million yuan for their ongoing research from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. 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. They said 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 recruitment flows both ways. Researchers of Chinese descent 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. 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. Prosecutors said 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.
Ms. 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 communist government’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 Dr. 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.
The authorities said that 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 Dr. 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. Dr. Lieber then distanced himself from the project, but continued to receive payment, prosecutors said.
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 Dr. Lieber — began questioning him in 2018 about secondary sources of income, prosecutors said.
Dr. 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, Dr. 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 Dr. 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 Mr. Adams, now a partner in the law firm Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell.
Frank Wu, a law professor and former president of the Committee of 100, an organization of prominent 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.