[Zaosong Zheng, a promising cancer researcher,
confessed that he had planned to take the stolen samples to Sun Yat-sen
Memorial Hospital, and publish the results under his own name.]
By
Ellen Barry
 |
|
An
entrance to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, in 2014. Zaosong
Zheng was
a cancer researcher there recently. Credit Steven Senne/Associated Press
|
BOSTON
— Zaosong Zheng was
preparing to board Hainan Airlines Flight 482, nonstop from Boston to Beijing,
when customs officers pulled him aside.
Inside his checked luggage, wrapped in a
plastic bag and then inserted into a sock, the officers found what they were
looking for: 21 vials of brown liquid — cancer cells — that the authorities say
Mr. Zheng, 29, a cancer researcher, took from a laboratory at Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Center.
Under questioning, court documents say, Mr.
Zheng acknowledged that he had stolen eight of the samples and had replicated
11 more based on a colleague’s research. When he returned to China, he said, he
would take the samples to Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital and turbocharge his
career by publishing the results in China, under his own name.
Mr. Zheng’s arrest on Dec. 10 signified an
escalation in the F.B.I.’s efforts to root out scientists who, the authorities
say, are stealing research from American laboratories. Federal prosecutors warn
that he may be charged with transporting stolen goods or with the theft of
trade secrets, a felony that brings a prison term of up to 10 years.
At a hearing on Monday, Magistrate Judge
David Hennessy granted prosecutors’ wish to hold Mr. Zheng without bail, noting
that the theft appeared to have the support of the Chinese government. Two
other Chinese scientists who worked in the same lab as Mr. Zheng had
successfully smuggled stolen biological material out of the country,
prosecutors say.
Mr. Zheng’s case is the first to unfold in
the laboratories clustered around Harvard University, but it is not likely to
be the last. Federal officials are investigating hundreds of cases involving
the potential theft of intellectual property by visiting scientists, nearly all
of them Chinese nationals.
Christopher Wray, director of the F.B.I.,
described the researchers as “nontraditional collectors” of intelligence acting
at the behest of the Chinese government, part of a collective effort to “steal
their way up the economic ladder at our expense.”
Dr. Ross McKinney Jr., chief scientific
officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, said the actions Mr.
Zheng was accused of were especially bold.
“This is one of the few cases where there’s
been stealing of physical material as well as the stealing of ideas,” he said.
“It’s an escalation over most of what we’ve been seeing.”
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, Dr. McKinney said. Among the 6,000 Chinese scientists who
have received grants from the National Institutes of Health, around 180 are
under investigation for possible violation of intellectual property law, he
said.
Harvard University had sponsored Mr. Zheng’s
visa starting on Sept. 4, 2018, according to Jason A. Newton, a spokesman for
the university. The visa support ended when Mr. Zheng lost his job at Beth
Israel Deaconess Medical Center, he said.
The hospital said in a statement that it was
cooperating with the investigation. “Any efforts to compromise research
undermine the hard work of our faculty and staff to advance patient care,” said
Jennifer Kritz, the hospital’s director of communication.
A message left for Brendan O. Kelley, Mr.
Zheng’s lawyer, was not returned.
Court records sketch out a cat-and-mouse game
between Mr. Zheng and Kara Spice, the F.B.I. special agent assigned to the
case. Customs and Border Protection agents had been warned that he was “a high
risk for possibly exporting biological undeclared biological material,” and
inspected his luggage in the airline’s bag room.
At first, Mr. Zheng deflected their interest
in the 21 vials, telling the agents that they “were not important and had nothing
to do with his research.” Then he offered another explanation, saying that they
had been given to him by a friend and that he had no plans to do anything with
them.
“Zheng could not explain why he was
attempting to leave the United States with the vials concealed in a sock in his
checked bag,” Ms. Spice’s statement says. Shortly thereafter, he confessed to
stealing the material.
Mr. Zheng booked another flight to China the
following day, but was detained by F.B.I. agents before he could board it,
court documents say. Through a Mandarin interpreter, he waived his Miranda
rights and told the agents he intended to use the samples for cancer research.
At that point, he was arrested.
Agents learned more when they visited Mr.
Zheng’s apartment, according to court documents. His former roommate, a fellow
medical researcher named Jialin Li, told them that Mr. Zheng had packed all his
possessions in preparation for his Dec. 9 flight, suggesting that he did not
intend to return to the United States.
Mr. Li also told them that two other Chinese
researchers, Lei Liu and Leina Mo, who had worked in the same laboratory at
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, had managed to smuggle biological
material into China without getting caught, according to court documents.
Mr. Zheng’s theft “was not an isolated
incident,” prosecutors stated in the motion to hold him without bail. “Rather,
it appears to have been a coordinated crime, with likely involvement by the
Chinese government, as two other Chinese nationals working in the same lab have
also stolen biological materials and smuggled them out of the United States.”
Medical Research
Ellen Barry is the New England bureau chief.
She joined The Times in 2007 and has served as bureau chief in Moscow and
Delhi, and in London as chief international correspondent. She was part of a
team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for a series on corruption in Russia’s
justice system. @EllenBarryNYT
