bloomberg | 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.
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