Tag Archives: Thousand Talents Program

Update on Charles Lieber (former Harvard professor) has been convicted

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That was quick. Lieber went on trial Tuesday, December 14, 2021 and he was found guilty of two charges one week later on Tuesday, December 21, 2021. (You can see my December 20, 2021 posting for mention of the trial and a description of the events leading up to it.)

As for the conviction, here’s more from a December 23, 2021 posting by Brian Liu and Raquel Leslie for the Law Fare blog (Note: Links have been removed),

The Justice Department announced on Tuesday [December 21, 2921] that Charles Lieber, former chair of Harvard’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, was convicted by a federal jury in connection with his ties to China’s Thousand Talents Program. Lieber was convicted for failing to report income and making false statements to authorities regarding his affiliation with the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT). The conviction is a significant chapter in the story of the department’s China Initiative, which has recently come under fire by groups who allege that the program has led to racial profiling and amounts to prosecutorial overreach. 

The jury convicted Lieber of knowingly and willfully making a materially false statement to federal authorities regarding his work with China’s Thousand Talents Program. The program, launched in 2008, began with the aim of reversing brain drain by enticing Chinese scientists overseas to return to China. Over time, the program evolved to also recruit foreigners with expertise in key technologies. The program provided Lieber with $50,000 a month to work at WUT, in addition to up to $150,000 in living expenses and more than $1.5 million in grants. Though it is not illegal to participate in Chinese recruitment programs, federal prosecutors alleged that Lieber had failed to report these payments as required of scientists receiving federal funding.

This is why Lieber’s prosecution is such a big deal (from the December 23, 2021 posting),

Lieber was seen by some as a potential Nobel Prize winner [emphasis mine] for his work in nanotechnology. Nanotechnology, the manipulation of materials at a near-atomic level, is a strategically important field with civilian and military application in medicine, green energy, computing and propulsion. In 2012, China’s Academy of Sciences launched a Strategic Pioneering Programme dedicated to nanotechnology research, investing one billion yuan ($152 million) over five years. As a result of the investment, China now ranks first worldwide for the number of patents and articles published on nanotechnology.

Both Liu and Leslie are JD (Juris Doctor) candidates (JD is an advanced law degree) at Yale Law School. Their posting is well worth reading in its entirety as they go on to discuss China and US tensions with regard to science and technology advancements. They also provide links to further commentaries at the end of their posting.

At this point (given limited information and from my admittedly amateur perspective), it looks more like a tax evasion case than anything else.

Charles Lieber, nanoscientist, and the US Dept. of Justice

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Charles Lieber, professor at Harvard University and one of the world’s leading researchers in nanotechnology went on trial on Tuesday, December 14, 2021.

Accused of hiding his ties to a People’s Republic of China (PRC)-run recruitment programme, Lieber is probably the highest profile academic and one of the few who was not born in China or has familial origins in China to be charged under the auspices of the US Department of Justice’s ‘China Initiative’.

This US National Public Radio (NPR) December 14, 2021 audio excerpt provides a brief summary of the situation by Ryan Lucas,

A December 14, 2021 article by Jess Aloe, Eileen Guo, and Antonio Regalado for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review lays out the situation in more detail (Note: A link has been removed),

In January of 2020, agents arrived at Harvard University looking for Charles Lieber, a renowned nanotechnology researcher who chaired the school’s department of chemistry and chemical biology. They were there to arrest him on charges of hiding his financial ties with a university in China. By arresting Lieber steps from Harvard Yard, authorities were sending a loud message to the academic community: failing to disclose such links is a serious crime.

Now Lieber is set to go on trial beginning December 14 [2021] in federal court in Boston. He has pleaded not guilty, and hundreds of academics have signed letters of support. In fact, some critics say it’s the Justice Department’s China Initiative—a far-reaching effort started in 2018 to combat Chinese economic espionage and trade-secret theft—that should be on trial, not Lieber. They are calling the prosecutions fundamentally flawed, a witch hunt that misunderstands the open-book nature of basic science and that is selectively destroying scientific careers over financial misdeeds and paperwork errors without proof of actual espionage or stolen technology.

For their part, prosecutors believe they have a tight case. They allege that Lieber was recruited into China’s Thousand Talents Plan—a program aimed at attracting top scientists—and paid handsomely to establish a research laboratory at the Wuhan University of Technology, but hid the affiliation from US grant agencies when asked about it (read a copy of the indictment here). Lieber is facing six felony charges: two counts of making false statements to investigators, two counts of filing a false tax return, and two counts of failing to report a foreign bank account. [emphases mine; Note: None of these charges have been proved in court]

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The case against Lieber could be a bellwether for the government, which has several similar cases pending against US professors alleging that they didn’t disclose their China affiliations to granting agencies.

As for the China Initiative (from the MIT Technology Review December 14, 2021 article),

The China Initiative was announced in 2018 by Jeff Sessions, then the Trump administration’s attorney general, as a central component of the administration’s tough stance toward China.

An MIT Technology Review investigation published earlier this month [December 2021] found that the China Initiative is an umbrella for various types of prosecutions somehow connected to China, with targets ranging from a Chinese national who ran a turtle-smuggling ring to state-sponsored hackers believed to be behind some of the biggest data breaches in history. In total, MIT Technology Review identified 77 cases brought under the initiative; of those, a quarter have led to guilty pleas or convictions, but nearly two-thirds remain pending.

The government’s prosecution of researchers like Lieber for allegedly hiding ties to Chinese institutions has been the most controversial, and fastest-growing, aspect of the government’s efforts. In 2020, half of the 31 new cases brought under the China Initiative were cases against scientists or researchers. These cases largely did not accuse the defendants of violating the Economic Espionage Act.

… hundreds of academics across the country, from institutions including Stanford University and Princeton University,signed a letter calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to end the China Initiative. The initiative, they wrote, has drifted from its original mission of combating Chinese intellectual-property theft and is instead harming American research competitiveness by discouraging scholars from coming to or staying in the US.

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Lieber’s case is the second [emphasis mine] China Initiative prosecution of an academic to end up in the courtroom. The only previous person to face trial [emphasis mine] on research integrity charges, University of Tennessee–Knoxville professor Anming Hu, was acquitted of all charges [emphasis mine] by a judge in June [2021] after a deadlocked jury led to a mistrial.

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Ken Dilanian wrote an October 19, 2021 article for (US) National Broadcasting Corporation’s (NBC) news online about Hu’s eventual acquittal and about the China Inititative (Note: Dilanian’s timeline for the acquittal differs from the timeline in the MIT Technology Review),

The federal government brought the full measure of its legal might against Anming Hu, a nanotechnology expert at the University of Tennessee.

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But the Justice Department’s efforts to convict Hu as part of its program to crack down on illicit technology transfer to China failed — spectacularly. A judge acquitted him last month [September 2021] after a lengthy trial offered little evidence of anything other than a paperwork misunderstanding, according to local newspaper coverage. It was the second trial, after the first ended in a hung jury.

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“The China Initiative has turned up very little by way of clear espionage and the transfer of genuinely strategic information to the PRC,” said Robert Daly, a China expert at the Wilson Center, referring to the country by its formal name, the People’s Republic of China. “They are mostly process crimes, disclosure issues. A growing number of voices are calling for an end to the China initiative because it’s seen as discriminatory.”

The China Initiative began under President Donald Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, in 2018. But concerns about Chinese espionage in the United States — and the transfer of technology to China through business and academic relationships — are bipartisan.

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John Demers, who departed in June [2021] as head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said in an interview that the problem of technology transfer at universities is real. But he said he also believes conflict of interest and disclosure rules were not rigorously enforced for many years. For that reason, he recommended an amnesty program offering academics with undisclosed foreign ties a chance to come clean and avoid penalties. So far, the Biden administration has not implemented such a program.

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When I first featured the Lieber case in a January 28, 2020 posting I was more focused on the financial elements,

ETA January 28, 2020 at 1645 hours: I found a January 28, 2020 article by Antonio Regalado for the MIT Technology Review which provides a few more details about Lieber’s situation,

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Big money: According to the charging document, Lieber, starting in 2011,  agreed to help set up a research lab at the Wuhan University of Technology and “make strategic visionary and creative research proposals” so that China could do cutting-edge science.

He was well paid for it. Lieber earned a salary when he visited China worth up to $50,000 per month, as well as $150,000 a year in expenses in addition to research funds. According to the complaint, he got paid by way of a Chinese bank account but also was known to send emails asking for cash instead.

Harvard eventually wised up to the existence of a Wuhan lab using its name and logo, but when administrators confronted Lieber, he lied and said he didn’t know about a formal joint program, according to the government complaint.

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This is messy not least because Lieber and the members of his Harvard lab have done some extraordinary work as per my November 15, 2019 (Human-machine interfaces and ultra-small nanoprobes) posting about injectable electronics.

Harvard professor and leader in nanoscale electronics charged with making false statements about Chinese funding

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I may be mistaken but the implication seems to be that Charles M. Lieber’s lies (he was charged today, January 28, 2020 ) are the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of a very large problem. Ellen Barry’s January 28, 2020 article for the New York Times outlines at least part of what the US government is doing to discover and ultimately discourage the theft of biomedical research from US laboratories.

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Dr. Lieber, a leader in the field of nanoscale electronics, was one of three Boston-area scientists accused on Tuesday [January 28, 2020] 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.

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.

Dr. Lieber, who was arrested on Tuesday [January 28, 2020], stands out among the accused scientists, because he is neither Chinese nor of Chinese descent. …

Lieber is the Chair of Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and much more, according to his Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),

Charles M. Lieber (born 1959) is an American chemist and pioneer in the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. In 2011, Lieber was recognized by Thomson Reuters as the leading chemist in the world for the decade 2000-2010 based on the impact of his scientific publications.[1] Lieber has published over 400 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has edited and contributed to many books on nanoscience.[2] He is the principal inventor on over fifty issued US patents and applications, and founded the nanotechnology company Nanosys in 2001 and Vista Therapeutics in 2007.[3] He is known for his contributions to the synthesis, assembly and characterization of nanoscale materials and nanodevices, the application of nanoelectronic devices in biology, and as a mentor to numerous leaders in nanoscience.[4] Thompson Reuters predicted Lieber to be a recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry [to date, January 28, 2020, Lieber has not received a Nobel prize].

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Should you search Charles Lieber or Charles M. Lieber on this blog’s search engine, you will find a number of postings about his and his students’ work dating from 2012 to as recently as November 15, 2019.

Here’s another example from Barry’s January 28, 2020 article for the New York Times which illustrates just how shocking this is (Note: Links have been removed),

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.

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.”

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Here’s a bit more about the Chinese program that Lieber is affiliated with,

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Launched in 2008, its [China] 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.

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.

I encourage you to read Barry’s entire article. It is jaw-dropping and, where Lieber is concerned, sad. It’s beginning to look like US universities are corrupt. The ‘Jeffrey Epstein (a wealthy and convicted sexual predator and more) connection’ to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which led to the resignation of a prominent faculty member (Sept. 19, 2019 article by Anna North for Vox.com), and the Fall 2019 cheating scandal (gaining admission to big name educational institutions by paying someone other than the student to take exams, among many other schemes) suggest a reckoning might be in order.

ETA January 28, 2020 at 1645 hours: I found a January 28, 2020 article by Antonio Regalado for the MIT Technology Review which provides a few more details about Lieber’s situation,

…

Big money: According to the charging document, Lieber, starting in 2011,  agreed to help set up a research lab at the Wuhan University of Technology and “make strategic visionary and creative research proposals” so that China could do cutting-edge science.

He was well paid for it. Lieber earned a salary when he visited China worth up to $50,000 per month, as well as $150,000 a year in expenses in addition to research funds. According to the complaint, he got paid by way of a Chinese bank account but also was known to send emails asking for cash instead.

Harvard eventually wised up to the existence of a Wuhan lab using its name and logo, but when administrators confronted Lieber, he lied and said he didn’t know about a formal joint program, according to the government complaint.

…

I imagine the money paid by the Chinese government is in addition to Lieber’s Harvard salary (no doubt a substantial one especially since he’s chair of his department and one of a select number of Harvard’s University Professors) and in addition to any other deals he might have on the side.