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Prosecutors believe they have a tight case. They claim that Lieber was included in the Thousand Talents Plan, a program aimed at attracting China’s top scientists, and paid a hefty sum to set up a research lab at Wuhan University of Technology, but that link was hidden from US grant organizations when asked. copy of the indictment here). Lieber faces six felony offenses: making false statements to investigators twice, filing false tax returns twice, and failing to report a foreign bank account twice.

“Simply put, the government will prove that Lieber deliberately made false statements to protect his reputation and career at Harvard University,” prosecutors said in a lawsuit brief filed last week.

In response, defense attorney Marc Mukasey said the government could not show that Lieber “knowingly, intentionally or willfully acted or made any material misrepresentation”.

Lieber is both the highest-profile academic assigned under the China Initiative and one of the handful of ethnically non-Chinese people.

The lawsuit against Lieber could be a harbinger for the government, which has similar lawsuits against US professors who allege that they haven’t disclosed their membership in China to grant-making institutions.

Andrew Lelling, a former US attorney for the District of Massachusetts, who served on the China Initiative steering committee before leaving the federal government for private practice, said he would not comment on any individual cases, but said he expected the government to do so. Successful in prosecuting cases like Lieber’s advance.

“My view is that research honesty cases often end up being won by the government. They’ve slowed down tremendously because of covid, so you’ve got a lot of unresolved cases, but you’ll find the government wins most of them,” Lelling told MIT Technology Review.

China Initiative

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

An MIT Technology Review study published earlier this month discovered it was a China Initiative It’s an umbrella for various types of prosecutions in some way linked to China, with targets ranging from a Chinese citizen running 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 in under the initiative; a quarter of these led to criminal charges or convictions, but about two-thirds remained suspended.

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

Hundreds of academics from institutions like Stanford University and Princeton University across the country last fall, signed a letter Urges Attorney General Merrick Garland to end the China Initiative. The initiative, they wrote, strayed from its original mission of combating Chinese intellectual property theft and instead deters academics from coming to or staying in the US, undermining American research competitiveness.

Among the cases that resulted in a criminal complaint:

• Xiao-Jiang Li, a former professor of genetics at Emory University, was convicted once in May 2020 of filing a false tax return. He was sentenced to one year probation and ordered to pay $30,000 in damages. He is currently a researcher at the National Academy of Sciences of China.

• Song Guo Zheng, a former Ohio State University professor, admitted in November 2020 that he was guilty of making false statements to investigators about a Chinese university and its affiliation with the Thousand Talents Plan. Zheng, who works on autoimmune disorders, was sentenced to 37 months in prison last summer and was ordered to pay the National Institutes of Health and his former employer roughly $4 million in damages.

After Zheng’s sentencing, prosecutors said they hope his fate will serve as a message to other academics. “We hope Zheng’s prison sentence deters others from having anything to do with China’s so-called ‘Thousand Talent Plan’ or any variation of it,” said Vipal J. Patel, acting US attorney for the Southern District of Ohio.

science in testing

Lieber’s case is the second China Initiative prosecution to end in an academic’s courtroom. The only previous person prosecuted on research integrity charges was University of Tennessee-Knoxville professor Anming Hu. acquitted of all charges by a judge in June after a stalemate led to a wrongful trial by a jury.

We have five more pending cases in our database involving research integrity charges against US university professors. (Click for a list of research integrity cases here. Click for full China Initiative database here.)

These include the case gang Chen, An MIT professor arrested at Boston Logan Airport in 2020, who was also charged with cheating grant institutions and failing to declare a foreign bank account. (MIT, which pays for Chen’s defense, says the major collaboration in question is actually a formal agreement he signed.)

nanowires

Lieber, now on paid administrative leave from Harvard, ran a leading lab specializing in building silicon nanowires into electronic devices, lasers, and even a neural network. injected into the brain as a brain-computer interface.

Lieber’s 2015 paper introducing the neural network was typical of his lab’s output, as nearly everyone (10 out of 13 authors) had a Chinese name. They were Harvard doctoral students and postdoctoral students, many of whom were recruited from mainland China for challenging roles in cutting-edge chemistry and trained as the next generation of scientists.

Gene editing expert David Liu, a professor in Harvard’s department of chemistry, said Lieber was unable to keep up with his legal status. “But I will say this as well as being a world-class scientist,” she says, “Charlie was a kind and devoted mentor to students and young colleagues, and one who worked tirelessly and selflessly to help others.”