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As far as prosecutors are concerned, they think their case is tight.They claimed that Lieber was recruited into China’s Thousand Talents Program-a program designed to attract top scientists-and paid a generous fee to establish a research laboratory at Wuhan University of Technology, but when asked about it U.S. funding agency concealed affiliation (read copy of indictment here). Lieber faces six felony charges: two charges of providing false statements to investigators, two charges of submitting false tax returns, and two charges of failing to report foreign bank accounts.
The prosecutor wrote in the summary of the case filed last week: “In short, the government will prove that Lieber deliberately made false statements…to protect his reputation and career at Harvard University.”
In response, defense attorney Marc Mukasey stated that the government will not be able to prove that Lieber “acted intentionally, deliberately, or deliberately, or that he made any material misrepresentation.”
Lieber is not only the most high-profile scholar accused under the “China Initiative”, but also one of the few non-Chinese scholars.
The case against Lieber may be a weather vane for the government. The government has several pending similar cases against American professors, accusing them of failing to disclose their relationship in China to funding agencies.
Andrew Lelling is a former U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts. He served on the China Initiative Steering Committee before leaving the federal government for private practice. He said that he would not comment on any individual cases, but he did say that he hopes the government can succeed. Lieber’s case was sued.
“My opinion is that scientific integrity cases usually lead to the government winning. Because of the new coronavirus, their speed has been greatly slowed down, so you have a lot of unresolved cases, but I think you will see the government win most of them, “Lelling told MIT Technology Review.
China Initiative
The China initiative was announced in 2018 by Jeff Sessions, then the Trump Administration’s Attorney General, as a core component of the government’s tough stance on China.
The MIT Technology Review survey published earlier this month Discover China Initiative It is an umbrella for all kinds of China-related prosecutions, ranging from Chinese citizens who run sea turtle smuggling gangs to state-sponsored hackers believed to be behind some of the largest data breaches in history. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Technology Review identified a total of 77 cases filed under the initiative; of these, a quarter have resulted in guilty pleas or convictions, but nearly two-thirds are still pending.
The government sued Lieber and other researchers for allegedly concealing relations with Chinese institutions. This has always been the most controversial and fastest-growing aspect of the government’s efforts. In 2020, half of the 31 new cases filed under the initiative of China are against scientists or researchers. These cases basically did not accuse the defendant of violating the “Economic Espionage Act.”
Last fall, hundreds of scholars from institutions such as Stanford University and Princeton University, Signed a letter Call on Attorney General Merrick Garland to end the Chinese initiative. They wrote that the initiative has deviated from its original mission of combating intellectual property theft in China, and instead harmed American research competitiveness by preventing scholars from coming to or staying in the United States.
In the case that led to the confession:
- Li Xiaojiang, a former professor of genetics at Emory University, pleaded guilty to one count of filing a false tax return in May 2020. He was sentenced to a one-year suspended sentence and ordered to pay $30,000 in damages. Currently a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
- Former Ohio State University professor Song Guozheng pleaded guilty in November 2020 to one count of misrepresenting his relationship with the Chinese University and the Thousand Talents Program to investigators. Zheng, who studies autoimmune diseases, was sentenced to 37 months in prison last summer and was ordered to pay approximately US$4 million in compensation to the National Institutes of Health and his former employer.
After Zheng was sentenced, the prosecutors stated that they hoped that his fate would convey a message to other scholars. The Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio (Vipal J. Patel) said: “We hope that Zheng’s imprisonment will prevent others from having any relationship with China’s so-called Thousand Talents Plan or any variant of it.”
Scientific trial
Lieber’s case is the second case proposed by China to prosecute a scholar who eventually appeared in court. Hu Anming, a professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, is the only person to be tried for scientific integrity charges. Acquit all charges After the jury was deadlocked and the trial was invalidated, it was raised by a judge in June.
There are also five outstanding cases in our database involving allegations of research integrity against American university professors. (For a list of research integrity cases, please click here. For a complete database of China Initiatives, please click here.)
These include the following Gang Chen, An MIT professor was arrested at Boston Logan Airport in 2020. He was also charged with defrauding funding agencies and failing to declare foreign bank accounts. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which paid for Chen’s defense, stated that the main controversial cooperation was actually a formal agreement it signed.)
Nanowires
Lieber is now taking paid administrative leave from Harvard. He runs a famous laboratory that specializes in building silicon nanowires into electronics, lasers, and even neural networks. Inject into the brain As a brain-computer interface.
Lieber’s 2015 paper introducing neural grids is a typical representative of his laboratory’s output, because almost everyone (10 of 13 authors) has a Chinese name. They are Harvard doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom were recruited from mainland China because they play a demanding role in cutting-edge chemistry and are being trained by the next generation of scientists.
David Liu, a gene editing expert and professor in the Department of Chemistry at Harvard University, said that he has not kept up with Lieber’s legal situation. “But what I want to say is that in addition to being a world-class scientist,” he said, “Charlie is also a kind and loyal mentor to students and junior colleagues, and a person who helps others tirelessly and selflessly.”
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