[A jury found Harvard chemist Charles
Lieber guilty of lying to the federal government about his participation in
China’s Thousand Talents recruitment program.]
By Ellen Barry
The university had money to spend —
“that’s one of the things China uses to try to seduce people,” Dr. Lieber said
in the interrogation, clips of which were shown in court.
But money wasn’t the reason, he
said. By training young scientists in the use of technology he had pioneered,
he hoped to burnish his credentials with the committee that decides the
ultimate scientific honor.
“This is embarrassing,” he said.
“Every scientist wants to win a Nobel Prize.”
On Tuesday, after deliberating for
two hours and 45 minutes, a federal jury found Dr. Lieber guilty of two counts
of making false statements to the U.S. government about whether he participated
in Thousand Talents Plan, a
program designed by the Chinese government to attract foreign-educated
scientists to China. They also found him guilty of failing to declare
income earned in China and failing to report a Chinese bank account.
Though it is not illegal to
participate in Chinese recruitment programs, scientists are required to
disclose their participation to the U.S. government, which also funds their
research and may view it as a conflict of interest.
Dr. Lieber’s conviction is a
victory for the China Initiative, an effort launched in 2018, under
the Trump administration, to root out scientists suspected of sharing sensitive
information with China.
Among the cases opened against
academic researchers, most, like the case against Dr. Lieber, do not allege
espionage or intellectual property theft, but failure to disclose Chinese
funding, and the effort has been criticized for prosecutorial overreach.
It suffered a series of setbacks
over the summer, with half a dozen cases dismissed and the first case to reach
the trial stage, against the researcher Anming Hu, ending in acquittal. Dr.
Lieber’s trial was watched closely in scientific circles, as an indicator of
whether the Justice Department will proceed with prosecutions of other
researchers.
Peter Zeidenberg, a Washington,
D.C., lawyer who represents around a dozen researchers who are under
investigation, said Dr. Lieber’s case stands out because he was specifically
asked about his participation in the Chinese program, and denied it.
“The reason people like Lieber lie
is because they are afraid,” he said. “It’s really sad. They are afraid to
answer truthfully, ‘Are you a member of the talent program?’ I’m sure in the
Red Scare, people said they were not a member of the Communist Party. ”
In closing arguments on Tuesday,
Dr. Lieber’s lawyer, Marc Mukasey, said the government had inadequate proof of wrongdoing
and risked silencing a pioneering researcher.
“Isn’t it troubling that nobody in
this courtroom has explained what the Thousand Talents Plan is and who is in
it?” he said. “Isn’t it troubling that Dr. Lieber’s work was all public, was
for the benefit of the world, yet he is facing criminal charges for it?”
He added, “No villains, no victims,
no one got robbed, no one got rich, but over a few seconds of conversation —
Special Agent Mousseau called it a blip on the radar — the world’s greatest
nanoscientist is facing multiple felonies.”
Among the researchers prosecuted as
part of the China Initiative, Dr. Lieber is by far the most prominent, chosen
as chairman of Harvard’s chemistry and chemical biology department and seen by
some as a potential Nobel Prize winner.
Since 2008, prosecutors said, his
laboratory at Harvard had received research grants totaling $18 million from
the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.
At issue in this case was a joint
venture that Dr. Lieber launched in 2011 with the Wuhan University of
Technology, where one of his former students had taken a post. Outside
employment is standard for high-level researchers, who often contract with private
sector firms or universities overseas for part of the academic year.
A three-year contract emailed to
Dr. Lieber in 2012, and displayed to the jury by prosecutors, identified him as
a “One Thousand Talent High Level Foreign Expert,” entitling him to $50,000 a
month, plus about $150,000 in living expenses and more than $1.5 million for
a laboratory, which they called the WUT-Harvard Joint Nano
Key Laboratory.
In 2018, as the China Initiative
got underway, investigators from the Department of Defense and the National
Institutes of Health approached Dr. Lieber to ask if he had taken part in the
Thousand Talents programs. Over the week-long trial, jurors heard from a series
of witnesses who said that in both instances, Dr. Lieber had denied
participating.
They also watched video clips from
an F.B.I. interrogation, conducted on Jan. 28, 2020, the morning Dr. Lieber was
arrested at 6:30 a.m. at his office at Harvard.
After initially asking for a
lawyer, Dr. Lieber went on to answer the agents’ questions for about three
hours, acknowledging at several points that he had misled investigators.
At first, he denied receiving
income from the Wuhan university or participating in the Chinese recruitment
program. Then the agents produced a series of documents, including contracts
from 2011 and 2012, and Dr. Lieber examined them, remarking at one point, “I
should pay more attention to what I’m signing.”
“That’s pretty damning,” he said.
“Now that you bring it up, yes, I do remember.”
He went on to offer detail about
his financial arrangements with the Wuhan university: A portion of his salary
was deposited in a Chinese bank account and the remainder — an amount he
estimated as between $50,000 and $100,000 — was paid in $100 bills, which he
carried home in his luggage.
“They would give me a package, a
brown thing with some Chinese characters on it, I would throw it in my bag,” he
said. After returning home, he said, “I didn’t declare it, and that’s illegal.”
He acknowledged, as well, that he
“wasn’t completely transparent by any stretch of the imagination” when
approached by investigators from the Department of Defense in 2018, and that he
was aware he might face charges.
“I was scared of being arrested,
like I am now,” he added.
As the jury prepared to deliberate,
Jason Casey, an assistant U.S. attorney, reminded jurors of Dr. Lieber’s
demeanor in the F.B.I. interview and urged them to “use your common sense.”
“It’s not that the defendant has no
memory of events prior to 2015,” he said. “It’s that he does not want to
remember. He does not want to remember that he participated in the Thousand
Talents program. He does not want to remember that he took bags of cash on an
airplane and never reported them to the I.R.S.”
‘Scaring the scientific community’
Dr. Lieber’s arrest was one of the
first signals that federal authorities were investigating scientists who had
received funding from Chinese sources, and it sent shock waves through academic
circles.
It was followed, in January of
2021, by the arrest of Gang Chen, a professor of mechanical engineering at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on suspicion of hiding affiliations with
Chinese government institutions in order to secure $19 million in U.S. federal
grants
Brian Timko, who worked under Dr.
Lieber as a graduate student and now heads his own laboratory at Tufts
University, said he believed China Initiative had strayed from its original
focus on espionage toward disclosure violations that, a few years ago, “would
have been handled at the university level.”
“I think these cases are about
scaring the scientific community,” he said.
Dr. Timko, who attended stretches
of the week-long trial, said he was troubled by the way Dr. Lieber's work had
been “twisted” by prosecutors.
He said Dr. Lieber had invented
electronic chips so small and flexible that they could be injected into parts
of the human body, like the brain or the retina. Eventually, he said, the
technology could lead to breakthroughs in bioelectronic medicine, like
restoring sight to blind people or movement to paralyzed limbs.
“Charlie spent his whole career
trying to help the world, and a handful of individuals who don’t even
understand how science works tore the whole thing down,” he said. “And that is
just not fair.”
Witnesses over the last week
painted Dr. Lieber as a demanding, sometimes impatient academic star, who
struggled to manage his relationship with his partners in Wuhan, and complained
that Harvard was not acting vigorously to defend him.
“I definitely do not have a good
taste” about “many ‘friends’ in China,” Dr. Lieber wrote in an email to a
Chinese colleague at another institution. “These people want to use me, so we
will not let that happen, versus me using them. But we’ll be ever so polite in
the mean time.”
He expressed alarm, in 2018, when
investigators from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of
Health began asking about his participation in the Thousand Talents plan.
“They are threatening not only to
end my funding (which supports much of my research) but also force me to pay
back the last three plus years they supported much of my work,” he wrote to a
Chinese colleague, adding, “perhaps someone (Chinese) who does not like me
brought this to attention of N.I.H.?”
In his conversation with the F.B.I.
agents on the day of his arrest, Dr. Lieber was reflective about the role of
international funding in the lives of researchers, saying that relationships
with foreign partners were never as straightforward as they seemed at first.
“Early on, if someone said, ‘We’ll
give you this title and we’ll pay your travel to and from,’ you don’t think
anything about it,” he explained, but partners “always want something from
you.”
“A lot of countries, money is what
they have in excess,” he said. He added, “that’s one of the things China uses
to seduce people.”
He tried to impress on the two
special agents that a different motive, the desire for acclaim, had brought him
to partner with Wuhan and train scientists there.
“I was younger and stupid,” he
said. “I want to be recognized for what I’ve done. Everyone wants to be
recognized.” He offered a comparison he had given his son, a high school
wrestler. The Nobel Prize is “kind of like an Olympic gold medal — it’s very,
very rare,” he said.
A prize he had won recently was
more like a bronze medal, he said with a self-deprecating laugh. “That probably
is the underlying reason I did this,” he said.
Ellen Barry is The Times's New England
bureau chief. She has previously served as The Times's Russia and South Asia
bureau chief and was part of a team that won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for
International Reporting. @EllenBarryNYT
A version of this article appears
in print on Dec. 22, 2021, Section A, Page 22 of the New
York edition with the headline: Top U.S. Chemist Guilty of Not
Disclosing Chinese Ties. Order
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