The U.S. Government’s China Crackdown Comes to Harvard

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- On Feb. 6, Charles Lieber was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, making the Harvard nanoscientist just the 30th person in history to achieve the hallowed hat trick at the apex of American science: membership in all three National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

A week earlier, however, he was ushered into a different federal institution in downtown Boston, in handcuffs and an orange jailhouse jumpsuit. He left the federal courthouse after posting $1 million in bail.

Lieber’s arrest on Jan. 28 came in connection with his dealings in China. He hasn’t been charged with any type of economic espionage, intellectual-property theft, or export violations. Instead, he’s accused of lying to U.S. Department of Defense investigators about his work with the People’s Republic—an eye-popping escalation of the Trump administration’s pursuit of scientists and engineers for secretly collaborating with America’s economic rival.

Until now, the government crackdown on undisclosed China ties has ensnared relatively obscure researchers, nearly all of them immigrants from China, in red states such as Georgia, Oklahoma, and Texas. But by targeting Lieber, the chairman of Harvard’s chemistry department and a veritable ivory tower blue blood, prosecutors struck at the crimson heart of the academic elite, raising fears that globalism, when it comes to doing science with China, is being criminalized. The collateral impact, if it deters Chinese students and researchers from coming to the U.S., threatens the American leadership in science and technology that the Trump administration says it’s trying to protect, academic leaders warn.

According to a government affidavit, signed by a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent named Robert Plumb, Lieber signed at least three agreements with Wuhan Technology University, or WUT, in central China. These included a contract with the state-sponsored Thousand Talents Plan—an effort by Beijing to attract mostly expatriate researchers and their know-how back home—worth a total of about $653,000 a year in pay and living expenses for three years, plus $1.74 million to support a new “Harvard-WUT Nano Key Lab” in Wuhan. The government offered no evidence that Lieber actually received those sums.

In April 2018, when Defense Department investigators asked Lieber about his ties to China, he responded that he was familiar with the Thousands Talents Plan but had never been asked to participate in the program, according to the FBI affidavit. “He also told DoD investigators that he ‘wasn’t sure’ how China categorized him,” the agent wrote.

Lieber also deceived Harvard about his China contracts, the affidavit said. Harvard placed Lieber on administrative leave upon his arrest and issued a statement calling the federal charges “extremely serious.” Lieber’s attorney, Peter Gelhaar, declined to comment.

Whatever extracurricular arrangements Lieber may have had in China, his Harvard lab was a paragon of U.S.-China collaboration. He relied on a pipeline of China’s brightest Ph.D. students and postdocs, often more than a dozen at a time, to produce prize-winning research on the revolutionary potential of so-called nanowires in biomedical implants. Dozens of Lieber’s 100 or so former lab members from China have chosen to stay in the U.S. Many now lead their own nanoscience labs at top universities, including Duke, Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford, University of California at Berkeley, and UCLA.

If star scientists such as Lieber are taken down over ties to China, will China’s most brilliant minds, whom U.S. universities and companies rely on increasingly to maintain their technical edge, balk at coming to America? Or, to use a buzzword that has nervously cropped up in U.S. research labs, is the blunt force of law enforcement, in effect, propelling the “decoupling” of the U.S. and China in science?

“I’m concerned that overreaction could damage the research enterprise in the U.S.,” says Thomas Rosenbaum, president of the California Institute of Technology. He doesn’t defend Lieber. In fact, if the government’s claims are true—that Lieber took millions of dollars from China and lied about it—Rosenbaum says such deception would be an egregious breach of Caltech’s own policies.

Still, Rosenbaum and other academic leaders question whether handling such cases with felony charges, rather than through normal administrative procedures at grant-making agencies and schools, sends the wrong signal that the U.S. is cutting research ties with China. “Violations of research integrity are wrong and need to be addressed,” says Toby Smith, vice president for policy at the American Association of Universities. “But we need to find the right balance so we don’t stop the flow of foreign talent.”

In fact, Ph.D. students in chemistry from China produce a significantly higher volume of scientific output while doing their doctorates in the U.S. than chemistry students from elsewhere, according to a study of some 16,000 Ph.D.s at 161 American universities published in the Review of Economics and Statistics in 2013. “If more-mediocre American graduates get to do Ph.D.s at Harvard instead of the brightest Chinese students, that’s a gigantic act of self-harm,” says Pierre Azoulay, an MIT economist who researches scientific productivity.

Senior Trump administration officials continue to ratchet up their China rhetoric. In a speech to U.S. governors on Feb. 8, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned that some of their state pension funds have invested in companies that provide surveillance cameras and military equipment to China’s security forces, affecting “our capacity to perform America’s vital national security functions.” Attorney General William Barr, speaking two days earlier at a Washington conference on the Department of Justice’s “China Initiative,” said China poses a greater threat than the old Soviet Union did. “Russia wants to conquer the world. We can deal with that. China wants to own the world,” said Barr, recalling a discussion he’d had at Columbia University, where he spent six years studying China as an undergraduate and master’s student in the 1970s.

China’s avarice, including “the outright stealing” of U.S. technology, poses an “unprecedented challenge” to the U.S., Barr said. “Our standard of living, our expanding economic opportunities for our young people and for future generations, and our national security all depend on our continued technological leadership.”

Lieber earned his Ph.D. at Stanford in 1985. In 1991, after stints at Caltech and Columbia, he moved to Harvard, where he was named chair of the department of chemistry and chemical biology in 2015. He was known among his students and postdocs as extremely demanding and hands-on, yet always generous with his time and advice, says Brian Timko of Tufts University, who earned a Harvard Ph.D. under him in 2009. Lieber’s inexhaustible work ethic and creativity fostered a restless energy in the lab, with a singular purpose, Timko says: “Everybody in Charlie’s lab knew exactly why you were there—to do good science and get it published.”

In the 1990s and 2000s, as Lieber’s achievements and stature were taking off, U.S. research institutions and grant makers pumped money and moral support into expanding the burgeoning collaborations between scientists in the U.S. and other countries, particularly China. The new paradigm was globalization, China was an emerging economic power, and Lieber’s lab became an exemplar of pan-Pacific collaboration. “Charlie would give presentations, meet people from around the world, and bring the best and brightest minds to Harvard to work with him,” says Galen Stucky, chair of materials chemistry at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who took several of Lieber’s Ph.D.s as postdocs. “I’m extremely proud and grateful to have known Charlie and worked with so many of his extraordinary students.”

Peidong Yang is a typical node on the worldwide Lieber alumni network. Now a top nanoscientist at Berkeley, Yang moved from China to Harvard in 1993 to earn his doctorate under Lieber, with whom he co-authored several seminal publications on nanowires, which are long, one-dimensional materials with infinitesimally small diameters that give them unique electrical and optical properties. He then did a postdoc with Stucky at Santa Barbara. In 2014, Yang became a founding dean of China’s ShanghaiTech University, and a year later he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. Yang, citing advice from Lieber’s defense attorney, declined to comment. His name does not appear in any court filings in Lieber’s case.

A more controversial Lieber protégé is Liqiang Mai, the international dean and chair of materials science at WUT, the little-known school in Wuhan that prosecutors allege recruited Lieber to be a “strategic scientist” in 2011, for $50,000 a month. Mai, who hasn’t been named in any U.S. filings against Lieber, earned a doctorate at WUT in 2004 and worked as a postdoc in Lieber’s lab from 2008 to 2011, according to Mai’s WUT online bio. He also worked in Yang’s Berkeley lab in 2017, his bio says. Mai could not be reached by phone or email in Wuhan, which is under strict government quarantine because of the coronavirus.

Lieber’s arrest shocked many of his devoted students and postdocs around the world. Although he has co-founded two companies in the past 20 years to commercialize his research, Nanosys Inc. and Vista Therapeutics Inc., since moving to Harvard he has lived in a modest home in Lexington. He has never shown any interest in getting rich, says Timko, his former student: “The Charlie I know was not driven by money. He was driven by science.”

While emails cited in the FBI affidavit indicated Lieber was paid some money in China, the government offered no evidence of how much. In similar investigations against other scientists accused of having undisclosed ties to China, the researchers never received anywhere close to what their contracts in China purportedly offered. In Lieber’s case, the initial WUT contract stipulated his $50,000-a-month salary would be prorated based on Lieber’s “actual work time,” so it could have been much less. His Thousand Talents Plan contract was based on Lieber working “at or for” WUT at least nine months a year, the FBI affidavit said. Given his responsibilities in Cambridge, that’s patently implausible, according to people who worked with him at Harvard.

Despite the risks to America’s research base, Andrew Lelling, the U.S. attorney in Boston, says charging the famous Harvard scientist represented a “very conscious escalation” meant to send a message to researchers in the U.S. and China that hiding ties to China “is a big problem” for federal grant recipients. “If the DoD or the NIH grant you money, we want to know if you have dual loyalties,” he says.

Lelling, one of five U.S. attorneys tapped to lead the Justice Department’s China Initiative, says the notoriety from such high-profile cases helps bridge what he calls the “cultural divide” between the government and universities on clashing priorities such as academic freedom and national security. Publicizing misconduct in an indictment shows everyone the government’s extensive outreach and concern about China are well-founded, he says: “It’s not just us being paranoid, jumping at every shadow.”

Still, Lelling sympathizes with academics who say they don’t know anymore what is and isn’t OK when it comes to working with China. “You can only use enforcement as a tool for policy so much. Then you need to go a step further,” he says. “That’s the responsibility of the regulatory bodies.”

Any resetting of the rules must allow for unfettered research collaborations, says Caltech’s Rosenbaum—relationships that he calls instrumental to national security, not anathema. “That is the narrow line we are walking now,” he says. “We want to remain the destination for the most talented researchers from around the world. It is fundamental to our ability to create knowledge.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Howard Chua-Eoan at hchuaeoan@bloomberg.net, John Voskuhl

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