In a Boston court docket, a famous person of science falls to Earth

Charles Lieber, one of many nation’s high analysis chemists, sat miserably in a chair on the Harvard Police Department, making an attempt to elucidate to 2 FBI brokers why he had agreed to associate with a lesser-known Chinese college in a relationship that had soured and landed him in bother with the US authorities.
The college had cash to spend — “that’s one of the things China uses to try to seduce people,” Lieber mentioned within the interrogation, clips of which have been proven in court docket.
But cash was not the explanation, he mentioned. By coaching younger scientists in the usage of expertise he had pioneered, he hoped to burnish his credentials with the committee that decides the final word scientific honor.
“This is embarrassing,” he mentioned. “Every scientist wants to win a Nobel Prize.”
On Tuesday, after deliberating for 2 hours and 45 minutes, a federal jury discovered Lieber responsible of two counts of constructing false statements to the US authorities about whether or not he participated in Thousand Talents Plan, a program designed by the Chinese authorities to draw foreign-educated scientists to China. They additionally discovered him responsible of failing to declare earnings earned in China and failing to report a Chinese checking account.
No date has been set for sentencing. A cost of constructing false statements carries a most sentence of 5 years. Lieber, who has most cancers, sat expressionless by way of the six-day trial and mentioned nothing as he left the courthouse together with his spouse.
Although it isn’t unlawful to take part in Chinese recruitment applications, scientists are required to reveal their participation to the US authorities, which additionally funds their analysis and will view it as a battle of curiosity.
Lieber’s conviction is a victory for the China Initiative, an effort begun in 2018 underneath the Trump administration, to root out scientists suspected of sharing delicate data with China.
“Mr. Lieber exploited the openness and transparency of our academic system,” mentioned Joseph Bonavolonta, who heads the Boston division of the FBI. “The FBI will not hesitate to work with our law enforcement partners to focus on those who put their financial and professional interests ahead of our country’s economic prosperity.”
Among the circumstances opened towards educational researchers, most, just like the case towards Lieber, don’t allege espionage or mental property theft, however failure to reveal Chinese funding, and the trouble has been criticised for prosecutorial overreach.
It suffered a collection of setbacks over the summer time, with a half-dozen circumstances dismissed and the primary case to achieve the trial stage, towards researcher Anming Hu, ending in acquittal. Lieber’s trial was watched carefully in scientific circles as an indicator of whether or not the Justice Department will proceed with prosecutions of different researchers.
Peter Zeidenberg, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who represents round a dozen researchers who’re underneath investigation, mentioned Lieber’s case stands out as a result of he was particularly requested about his participation within the Chinese program and denied it.
“The reason people like Lieber lie is because they are afraid,” he mentioned. “It’s really sad. They are afraid to answer truthfully, ‘Are you a member of the talent program?’ I’m sure during the Red Scare, people said they were not a member of the Communist Party.”
In closing arguments Tuesday, Lieber’s lawyer, Marc Mukasey, mentioned the federal government had insufficient 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 mentioned. “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 a part of the China Initiative, Lieber is by far essentially the most distinguished, chosen as chair of Harvard’s chemistry and chemical biology division and seen by some as a possible Nobel Prize winner.
Since 2008, prosecutors mentioned, his laboratory at Harvard had obtained analysis grants totaling $18 million from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.
At concern on this case was a three way partnership that Lieber launched in 2011 with the Wuhan University of Technology, the place one in all his former college students had taken a put up. Outside employment is commonplace for high-level researchers, who usually contract with private-sector companies or universities abroad for a part of the tutorial yr.
A 3-year contract emailed to Lieber in 2012 and exhibited to the jury by prosecutors recognized him as a “One Thousand Talent High Level Foreign Expert,” entitling him to $50,000 a month, plus about $150,000 in dwelling bills and greater than $1.5 million for a laboratory, which they referred to as the WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory.
In 2018, because the China Initiative acquired underway, investigators from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health approached Lieber to ask if he had taken half within the Thousand Talents applications. Over the weeklong trial, jurors heard from a collection of witnesses who mentioned that in each situations, Lieber had denied taking part.
They additionally watched video clips from an FBI interrogation carried out Jan. 28, 2020, the morning Lieber was arrested at 6:30 a.m. at his workplace at Harvard.
After initially asking for a lawyer, Lieber went on to reply the brokers’ questions for about three hours, acknowledging at a number of factors that he had misled investigators.
At first, he denied receiving earnings from the Wuhan college or taking part within the Chinese recruitment program. Then the brokers produced a collection of paperwork, together with contracts from 2011 and 2012, and Lieber examined them, remarking at one level, “I should pay more attention to what I’m signing.”
“That’s pretty damning,” he mentioned. “Now that you bring it up, yes, I do remember.”
He went on to supply element about his monetary preparations with the Wuhan college: A portion of his wage was deposited in a Chinese checking account, and the rest — an quantity he estimated as between $50,000 and $100,000 — was paid in $100 payments, which he carried house in his baggage.
“They would give me a package, a brown thing with some Chinese characters on it, I would throw it in my bag,” he mentioned. After returning house, he mentioned, “I didn’t declare it, and that’s illegal.”
He additionally acknowledged 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 conscious he may face fees.
“I was scared of being arrested, like I am now,” he added.
As the jury ready to deliberate, Jason Casey, an assistant US lawyer, reminded jurors of Lieber’s demeanor within the FBI interview and urged them to “use your common sense.”
“It’s not that the defendant has no memory,” he mentioned. “He does not want to remember because he knows that he agreed that contract, that he participated in the Thousand Talents program, that he took bags of cash on an airplane and never reported them to the IRS.”
‘Scaring the scientific community’
Lieber’s arrest was one of many first indicators that federal authorities have been investigating scientists who had obtained funding from Chinese sources, and it despatched shock waves by way of educational circles.
It was adopted, in January 2021, by the arrest of Gang Chen, a professor of mechanical engineering on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on suspicion of hiding affiliations with Chinese authorities establishments with a purpose to safe $19 million in US federal grants.
Brian Timko, who labored underneath Lieber as a graduate scholar and now heads his personal laboratory at Tufts University, mentioned he believed China Initiative had strayed from its unique concentrate on espionage towards disclosure violations that, a couple of years in the past, “would have been handled at the university level.”
“I think these cases are about scaring the scientific community,” he mentioned.
Timko, who attended stretches of the weeklong trial, mentioned he was troubled by the best way Lieber’s work had been “twisted” by prosecutors.
He mentioned Lieber had invented digital chips so small and versatile that they might be injected into components of the human physique, just like the mind or the retina. Eventually, he mentioned, the expertise might result in breakthroughs in bioelectronic medication, like restoring sight to blind individuals or motion to paralysed 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 mentioned. “And that is just not fair.”
Witnesses during the last week painted Lieber as a demanding, generally impatient educational star who struggled to handle his relationship together with his companions in Wuhan and complained that Harvard was not performing vigorously to defend him.
“I definitely do not have a good taste” about “many ‘friends’ in China,” Lieber wrote in an e mail to a Chinese colleague at one other establishment. “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 started asking about his participation within 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, including, “perhaps someone (Chinese) who does not like me brought this to attention of NIH?”
In his dialog with the FBI brokers on the day of his arrest, Lieber was reflective in regards to the position of worldwide funding within the lives of researchers, saying that relationships with international companions have been by no means as easy as they appeared 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 defined, however companions “always want something from you.”
“A lot of countries, money is what they have in excess,” he mentioned. He added, “that’s one of the things China uses to seduce people.”
He tried to impress on the 2 particular brokers {that a} totally different motive, the will for acclaim, had introduced him to associate with Wuhan and prepare scientists there.
“I was younger and stupid,” he mentioned. “I want to be recognised for what I’ve done. Everyone wants to be recognised.” He provided a comparability he had given his son, a highschool wrestler. The Nobel Prize is “kind of like an Olympic gold medal; it’s very, very rare,” he mentioned.
A prize he had gained just lately was extra like a bronze medal, he mentioned with a self-deprecating giggle. “That probably is the underlying reason I did this,” he mentioned.
This article initially appeared in The New York Times.