[ May 1, 2024 ]
The criminal complaint against Lieber alleges that he lied to both the government and Harvard. According to the complaint, Lieber was involved with the program from at least 2012 to 2017. His contract called for a salary as high as $50,000 a month, along with about $150,000 per year for living expenses and $1.5 million to establish a lab at the Wuhan University of Technology.
Harvard Professor’s Arrest Raises Questions About Scientific Openness
NPR, February 19, 2020
Story continues below advertisementUntil late last month, Charles Lieber lived the quiet life of an elite American scientist. His lab at Harvard University researched things like how to meld tiny electronics with the brain. In his spare time, he grew award-winning pumpkins in front of his house.
And then, on Jan. 28, the FBI came knocking on his door.
Now Lieber faces charges of trading knowledge for money and lying about it. Prosecutors allege he set up a lab in China in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from the Chinese government and then denied knowledge of those payments to U.S. investigators.
Lieber’s attorney, Peter Levitt, declined to talk to NPR about the allegations. But others watching the case say it raises important questions about ethics, scientific openness and possible racial profiling in an era of geopolitical tension.
“This is a big, big case,” says Frank Wu, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law who tracks Chinese espionage cases. “This is a case that’s all about U.S.-China relations. It’s about competition. It’s about how science should be done.”
The Lieber case centers on a Chinese recruitment program called the Thousand Talents Plan. It was started by the Chinese government in 2008, primarily as a way to draw Chinese researchers back to China, according to Michael Lauer, the deputy director of extramural research at the National Institutes of Health.
“The Chinese government wanted to bring back outstanding scientists to China, so as to develop their science and technology,” Lauer says.
Over time, the program began to recruit Western scientists as well. Researchers were asked to set up labs in China and spend at least part of their time doing work there, in exchange for grants and expenses paid. Some relocated to China, but others split their time between their home institutions and a Chinese university.
Such programs exist in other countries. Canada, for example, has had a 150 Research Chairs program that looks similar in many ways to the Thousand Talents Plan.
But the NIH has become aware of numerous ethical breaches related to the Chinese plan, Lauer says. Some researchers have submitted identical grant applications to both the NIH and Thousand Talents. Others have shared confidential grant applications from other researchers with their collaborators in China. And then there is the question of money: Researchers are failing to disclose the funding they receive from China to U.S. agencies like the NIH, as required by law.
“The types of behaviors that we are seeing are not subtle or minor violations,” Lauer says. “What we’re seeing is really quite egregious.”
The funding issues have already cost over a dozen researchers their jobs at institutions around the U.S. Lauer says the NIH is investigating about 180 other scientists, though many other participants appear to be conducting their work aboveboard.
The increased scrutiny by research agencies like NIH has been accompanied by a rise in criminal prosecutions by the Justice Department. In 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions launched what he called the China Initiative, a broad program to crack down on the transfer of U.S. knowledge to China. To date, the initiative has brought criminal charges against dozens of people and won several convictions for espionage.
These kinds of cases are not always straightforward, especially when fundamental research is involved. In spring 2015, Xi Xiaoxing, a physicist at Temple University in Philadelphia, was arrested and accused of sharing sensitive technology with his collaborators in China.
It later emerged that he never did. What’s more, he says, everything he did share was already public, because the findings of basic research aren’t secret. They’re published in scientific journals.
“Academic espionage is a contradiction,” Xi says. “There’s nothing to steal, you can just sit there and read your paper.”
Xi Xiaoxing was falsely accused by the government of transferring technology to Chinese collaborators.
The federal prosecutor who is pursuing the case against Harvard chemist Charles Lieber agrees.
“All the Thousand Talents program does is induce people who are doing research in the United States to come to China, and do the same research, by offering them money,” says Andrew Lelling, the United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts. “And that’s not illegal, per se.”
But Lelling says researchers have to disclose the money they receive to funding agencies and to their home university. That’s in part because federal research agencies don’t want to pay for the same science twice — in the U.S. and in China.
The criminal complaint against Lieber alleges that he lied to both the government and Harvard about his involvement in the Thousand Talents Plan. According to the complaint, Lieber was involved with the program from at least 2012 to 2017. His contract called for a salary as high as $50,000 a month, along with about $150,000 per year for living expenses and $1.5 million to establish a lab at the Wuhan University of Technology.
Lieber set up the “WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory,” according to the complaint, without telling Harvard about it. The complaint says that when questioned by Harvard and investigators from the Department of Defense, which, together with the NIH, gave him nearly $18 million in grants, Lieber said, “He was never asked to participate in the Thousand Talents Program.” Lieber is currently out on a $1 million dollar bond.
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27 Comments
4 years ago
Now how can the ignorant criminal libturds blame this on trump????
4 years ago
I suspect there are allot of professors at ivy league universities having allot to hide.
Tom Cotton may be right. I’d bet this viris was generated at their bio lab in China as a biological weapon and by accident it got out and started infecting others. You can NEVER believe the Communist Chinese.
4 years ago
Reply to
felix1999
Canada is involved as well. 2 Chinese scientists buggered off to China with 2 vials of weaponized viruses. They worked at Canada’s Top Secret research facility in Edmonton Alberta. An arrest warrant was issued. Ya, like that will work eh? That was a week or 2 before the outbreak. And Canada’s Prime Minister is an avowed muslim and a very staunch supporter of Xi of China. He has publicly stated his extreme love and respect for Xi on many occasions. As well as his support for their Dictatorship.
4 years ago
Perhaps this Professor needs his TDS Levels tested ……… pretty sure he’ll test POSITIVE !!
4 years ago
They should take Dr. Charles Lieber and send him to Gitmo for the rest of his life. The federal government, and all the country’s governments, that have had cases of the coronavirus, should sue Harvard out of existence.
4 years ago
Reply to
Navy_Vet
Evidently the greedy left no longer has any sense of patriotic loyalty and will sell their soul and their country for a buck. They are complete rubbish.
4 years ago
Reply to
Navy_Vet
Now here’s a fellow sailor that things the right way. Enough is Enough, lock these dogs up.
4 years ago
Ach du lieber!
Maybe Lieber will be on the next plane to the PRC?
At my friend’s work they discovered someone was eating up all their internet bandwidth when they traced the PC it was coming from it was a Chinese intern’s and it was trying to send out the entire source code for their product. The Chinese “intern” never returned to work after that incident and disappeared shortly thereafter (i.e. his apartment was vacated and his phones disconnected w/no forwarding address).
4 years ago
Reply to
MuhamMUDTheFakeProphet
What you described is not uncommon.
Chinese VISA students LOVE OPT, (Optional Practical Traning). Do note when these VISA changes happened.
They started under GWB in the spring of his last year. I’m sure the Chamber of Commerce was ecstatic. When Obama took over he enlarged the programs and the numbers of foreign students particpating in it. Companies are financially incented to take them on. They push salaries and wages down and companies are given breaks for taking these foreigners in. Companies have little incentive to go with legal U.S. students.
Optional Practical Training (OPT) is a period during which undergraduate and graduate students with F-1 status who have completed or have been pursuing their degrees for one academic year are permitted by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to work for one year on a student visa towards getting practical training to complement their education.
On April 2, 2008, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Michael Chertoff announced a 17-month extension to the OPT for students in qualifying STEM fields.[1][2] To be eligible for the 12-month permit, any degree in any field of studies is valid. For the 17-month OPT extension, a student must have received a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics degree as listed on the USCIS website.
On May 31, 2008, the Immigration Reform Law Institute filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of various organizations and individuals challenging the validity of the 17 month OPT extension. A similar lawsuit in November 2014 challenging the STEM extension was successful, with the Court giving the US government up to February 12, 2016 to formulate new rules.[3][4] The deadline was subsequently extended by three months.
On March 11, 2016, the Department of Homeland Security published a final rule allowing certain F-1 students who receive science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees, and who meet other specified requirements, to apply for a 24-month extension of their post-completion OPT, giving STEM graduates a total of 36 months of OPT. The 24-month extension will replace the 17-month STEM OPT extension previously available to STEM students (see 73 FR 18944). Eligible students may begin applying for a 24-month STEM OPT extension on May 10, 2016.[5]
There also exists a post-completion Optional Practical Training option for students on M-1 visas, but it is significantly more restrictive than that for F-1 students.[6][7] Unless otherwise specified, Optional Practical Training is understood to refer to Optional Practical Training for F-1 students.
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_Practical_Training
The bottom line is GWB started this abuse and Obama totally screwed people over in STEM in favor of foreigners and there was not a peep out of the swamp about this.
4 years ago
the ivy league is to america as oxford was to britain in the 1930’s…..traitorous rich kids
4 years ago
Reply to
tituspullo
BIGGEST LINE EVER – RICH KIDS GET TO EXPERIMENT WITH THE LIVES OF MILLIONS WITHOUT FACING RESPONSIBILITIES AND CONSEQUENCES- RICH FOLK IN POLITICS AND ACADEMIA AND MEDIA ARE EVIL
4 years ago
To me I would love to hang many taking businesses, secrets and bringing Communism into free countries already under attack by the left and Islam while selling of our freedoms.
Number of Chinese students in US, over 360,000 probably around 400,000 or more.
Unfortunately it has become a money game. In Australia the students from China should be banned about 160,000 with fears of Corona Virus that want to return to Australia. Government has bowed to the Universities as money into country with China saying there has been a reduction. To me lies as you just have to look at South Korea and other countries, slowly doubling in CoronaVirus detections.
Universities worry about potential loss of Chinese students
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/universities-worry-about-potential-loss-of-chinese-students/2019/06/03/567044ea-861b-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html
Australia still number one place for Chinese students about 80% Communist
Student numbers at Australian Universities 985,000 not including Primary Schools
https://www.australianuniversities.com.au/directory/student-numbers/
International students may be able to bring their family with them when they come to study in Australia.
Fees for International Students Children
https://pathwaytoaus.com/blog/high-and-primary-schools-fees-for-international-students-children/
4 years ago
Reply to
knightsstrength
International students pay the full freight in tuition. That is very attractive to the university. They can’t get enough money.
4 years ago
Nobody should wonder about the incredibly rapid developing Chinese economy and science.
90% are based on stolen knowledge, fraud, bribery, corruption.
China (beside Islam) is the most dangerous challenge of this century.
All of this could happen only by the massive assistance of criminals on the hightest political, economical and scientific levels.
Those people are well known – traitors to the American people like the Bidens, the Bloombergs, the Liebers and many more…
4 years ago
There is no shortage of traitors especially from the left and the elite who have sold our country out to many of our enemies. The penalty for treason is death!
4 years ago
congrats china, u stole the secret formula… now we all get to suffer your evil plans… who puts dangerous microbes in a city of 11 million, instead of in an underground out in the desert type place? the communist, thats who. this professor needs public execution
4 years ago
Was it just greed and treason? I have to wonder if he is another left wing loon that thinks human beings are parasites that must be exterminated.
4 years ago
This is news? Our “prestigious” universities have been rotten with commies, islamists and Chinese spies for decades.
4 years ago
You let him out? Are you nuts?
4 years ago
The Fake Indian lied to Harvard and everyone when claiming for years that she was a Native American, and Harvard paid her $ 350,000 large per year for teaching one class.
And if one listens to her verbal diarrhea, she clearly is a Marxist as well. Yet I don’t see the FBI arresting her….
4 years ago
Reply to
ed
there is no more rule of law it’s all arbitrary- normal people can have the book thrown at us anytime for any attempt even at violating any laws or shaking any cages the elites don’t want you to shake – the elites through – they get away with MURDER – TREASON – and FRAUD in a scale that once understood just forces a normal man like me to drink.
all socialists are traitors and are better off dead
4 years ago
How did racial profiling get thrown in the mix? Because they were Chinese? They were sending information back to China, so of course they were Chinese. Also, according to Xi Xiaoxing , the Rosenbergs were not guilty of espionage, just “academic information sharing.” Nice try!
4 years ago
Why is this not being covered by the msm? Is this another thing everybody knows, but nobody is permitted to speak of?
