The U.S. Is Purging Chinese Cancer Researchers from Top Institutions | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. Is Purging Chinese Cancer Researchers from Top Institutions

bloomberg.com

This is a little weird to me. Why purge cancer research? So what if China steals a cure for certain types of cancer and starts making it? Some American company makes slightly less profit? It's not a national security issue, like making sure critical infrastructure is only open to the NSA. It wouldn't even be easy to reimport a "cancer cure" pill from china into the American market. And it's way easier to reverse engineer a drug that china produces from research stolen from the US then it is to do that research in the first place.

> Some American company makes slightly less profit?

I mean, bingo.

>Some American company makes slightly less profit?

That's a bingo. Now allow me to morally justify this AMERICA style:

"When we allow foreign researchers to steal research from healthcare businesses it reduces the return on investment these businesses make. This has a chilling effect on the amount of Cancer research that can be funded. With less innovation by the world leader in Cancer research ultimately more patients will unnessecarily die and suffer"

But how much does it actually cost to re-steal that IP back from China? Does America actually respect chinese intellectual property?

Re-stealing the IP isn't as profitable as being the first to market. I guess ?

Is the chemo market sensitive to first-to-market effects ?

This is an interesting argument, but I think there are some logical problems in it. But it is the type of argument you will hear as justification for this approach.

Anyone uses "chilling effect on investment" in an argument for something is probably lying through their teeth trying to deceive you.

See also: trickle down economics, safety regulations, consumer financial protections...

I agree, theres some obvious mission creep going on here:

>Her resignation, and the departures in recent months of three other top Chinese American scientists from Houston-based MD Anderson, stem from a Trump administration drive to counter Chinese influence at U.S. research institutions.

Did she or did she not Chinesely influence the Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center?

About 25 years ago I started making the snide comment that our leaders think they own all those factories in China making our stuff. Looks like recently they figured out that's not the case and are now panicking. Or more to the point China is starting to create it's own IP, patents, and trade secrets.

Collaboration is a two way street. I feel for Wu in the article and it seems like she puts research over politics, but the fact of the matter still stands: is research being shared fairly? I seem to think not based on past experiences whenever a new virus strains pop up in China they drag their feet on providing samples, if at all [1].

So, if we share our cancer research, which costs billions, with China, can we expect them to return the favor? Or will it be used as leverage?

[1] https://www.livescience.com/63448-china-h7n9-flu-samples-pan...

Trade war is one thing, but using trade war to purge an entire ethnic group is a totally different level.

Remember those Japanese in concentration camp during WWII? I thought this won't happen again. But now, with those news and comments, I need to reconsider.

I think you need to go have a lie down. Nobody is being ethnically cleansed.

He is not claiming it's happening, he simply states he's no longer certain it won't happen again within our lifetimes...

Well, maybe it's click baiting. But here goes the tag line of the article: "The NIH and the FBI are targeting ethnic Chinese scientists, including U.S. citizens, searching for a cancer cure."

The article starts with:

>The NIH and the FBI are targeting ethnic Chinese scientists, including U.S. citizens, searching for a cancer cure.

So, uhm, ... what 2-way street are we discussing? and how do we deal with people with a single Chinese parent? or 4 Chinese grandparents? ... does it involve measuring skulls as well? this is going over the top...

I would presume it's people who were born in the PRC.

The article is unnecessarily inflammatory.

Every example the author gives of a Chinese or Chinese-American academic investigated by the FBI had prior ties to Chinese gov't run "innovation" programs. Many of these programs exist solely to transfer (i.e., steal) foreign IP.

steal?

>Along the way, Wu developed close ties with researchers and cancer centers in China. She was encouraged to do so by MD Anderson. The center’s president in the early 2000s, John Mendelsohn, launched an initiative to promote international collaborations. In China, MD Anderson forged “sister” relationships with five major cancer centers, cooperating on screening programs, clinical trials, and basic research studies.

Instead of harassing employees doing their job, or research centers doing their job, how about if FBI want's to powertrip, they simply individually vote to make collaboration illegal, and only when it passes the legislative branch then prosecute? This is just framing people...

You have strange ideas about the FBI's legislative authority.

which is exactly my point: the executive has no legislative power, any desire to enact something into law can only happen through the votes of the employees as individuals as a small fraction of the entire populace...

The idea that anyone person or entity should be able to 'own' information about curing cancer is such a moral abyss.

When someone talks about "stealing" in this context, they are revealing that they care more about their right to rent seek from the poor than basic human decency.

Just because an institution seeks to cure cancer, does that mean all their techniques, trade secrets, and knowledge that is unrelated to a cancer cure is up for grabs?

No one has cured cancer yet. If you steal from one of these institutions, what you are stealing definitely isn’t a cancer cure.

I mean it's not like they're exclusively doing this to ethnic Chinese-Americans, just anyone associated with the PRC. You're taking it out of context.

Anybody who's hung out at a US university or worked in tech knows that most of the STEM graduate students and professors are immigrants or guests in the US. China and India plus many other countries have been giving a gift to the United States for decades by sending us their best students and yes, of course, it pays back to the countries who send these students, but to the extent this is policy directed enforcement, in my view it mistakes which direction the majority of the benefit has been flowing. None of that is to say that we should allow spying or theft of IP, but let's do recognize that much of the IP we're trying to protect would not exist if the foreigners and immigrants were not in the US in the first place.

Well said! FBI and NHI are actually doing China a service by forcing these scientists out of the country. The Thousand Talents program was created to attract the best talents back to China, when Chinese government realized they’re losing top talents to US and other countries. Apparently it has failed to attract Wu back twice but these US investigations did the job.

If US seriously wants to keep an upper hand in competition with China, it should do its best to keep the best minds here on US, not chase them out.

I feel like the US is shooting a bullet in its foot here.

They did the same with Qian Xuesen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen).

Yes, if there was any "theft" it was the original brain drain, now what is the result? A great epidemiologist moved to China...

It's sad we can't all collaborate together on something as deadly as cancer.

There are lots of successful collaborations happening between US and Chinese scientists. However, like in all scientific disciplines, there some bad apples, and for some, the temptations to improperly share confidential information is too great. Theft of IP is not a good thing, even in oncology.

Theft, IP? Cancer research?!

Oh! I can see the facepalms forming a recursively fractal Mandala...

Any attempt to enforce intellectual property around cancer research is moral bankruptcy.

We should not value the "right to rent seek" over basic human decency and access to life-saving knowledge - ever.

You seem to miss the point in the article that there’s no theft happening in this case. The scientist in question is the scientist who had been leading the research.

The economics are getting in the way of science and human care. Maybe there could be another structure to motivate collaboration and sharing of ideas.

I have suspected for a long time that something like this would happen.

People in other countries would be hungrier for success than Americans, their kids would study harder in school, workers would be more motivated.

In the end, we in the US are struggling to hang on to our “exceptionalism” anyway we can. In my opinion it is too late to fix things because there are too many power and moneyed interests who want to ride our system down into the ground while in the short term maximizing their own benefits. Oh well, so it goes.

Trade war. Research purge. Huawei blacklisting. Bloomberg Supermicro smear campaign.

Why is public opinion about China being manipulated in the media so decisively? This worries me greatly.

Hopefully this is just the military prepping to go attempt to stop the organ harvesting and ethnic cleansing, but who knows. It could also be prep for a DPRK “solution”.

The whole thing is gross. It is disgusting that the US government keeps so many variables hidden.

This is going to end badly.

China is no Iraq or Afganistan. I think USA might have bitten more than they can chew this time with some serious global repercussions.

https://www.modernhealthcare.com/technology/texas-cancer-cen...

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...

If you think there are hidden variables, you're not well informed.

China frankly deserves it.

They chose to steal IP from companies on a level never been seen. So of course countries and companies are wary of doing business with them. And many countries have issues with China not just the US.

Except the US is being the most overt and also the only one with such a comprehensive media campaign verging on demonization. Doesn't really help that the American mentality is exceptionally suited to receiving such propaganda as truth.

> Except the US is being the most overt > a comprehensive media campaign verging on demonization.

I don't think either of these things are true. Firstly, the Japanese have been more "overt" than the US. So get over the fact you JUST NOTICED the media coverage, as if that has any bearing on the morality judgement you're trying to throw around. The media is picking up the latest scare story and running with it, because surprise China really is a bad actor in many sectors.

China may deserve it, but what about individual ethnic Chinese in the US, who may even have left because of the oppressive political system in the PRC? Making them collateral damage is pretty shortsighted in my opinion.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. I'm all for rooting out Chinese IP thieves and generally think the "trade war" is deserved, but it's absolutely unacceptable to target an American citizen due to their ethnicity. We can't sacrifice our ideals out of fear, and especially not for convenience.

Well said.

Why should China honor the US's draconian and overbearing IP laws at the expense of the rest of the global community?

I want to preface the statement I am about to make with another statement first: The basic economic theory, if anyone needs a refresher, is that by letting people have a temporary monopoly over an invention, they will be more-so incentivized to pour money into the development of inventions than they otherwise would. The US has historically been the most stringent protector of intellectual property, we have a vastly outsized technology and research sector versus the rest of the world, and most people in this country believe those two things are causally related. I do not believe in that causal relationship as there is plenty of evidence that it is overblown or non-existent. E.g., I believe our outsized technology sector thrives in spite of, not because of, our stringent ip laws.

Now then, onto China stealing tech. This is absolutely happening. They have some of the weakest IP protection in the world. They don't just steal from us, businesses in China also steal from other businesses in China. They steal from everyone. It's in the open. It's not a smear campaign, it's an entirely different cultural and governmental take on how IP rights should be enforced, if at all.

There is no conspiracy here. These are directly two very different views on how IP should be handled.

I don’t think differing views on IP is the root cause here. It seems to me like it’s a convenient cover story, because shaping public opinion so starkly doesn’t help the battle over IP.

Why would you expect the US executive branch to care about organ harvesting and ethnic cleansing?

It's been happening for a long time, and they've never shown more interest in doing something about it than "embarassing China a bit might help our negotiation position"

I wonder if this is related (well, yes it is partially related to the trade war) to news reports of Chinese research mills that pump out bunk academic papers, even ones that are peer reviewed...which just turn out to be completely fake

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/world/asia/china-science-...

Don’t trust everything nytimes says about China considering their history of extremely biased and unfair reports on the subject (https://youtu.be/mvpo2jv5eqI).

Coming from an academic background, I actually don’t know how it’s possible to fake your own peer reviews, considering most scientific journals have their own set of trustable reviewers.

What worries me enormously: since when do employers have jurisdiction to approve surveillance over their employees outside of work?? :

>In November 2017 the FBI asked for more information. This time, no subpoena followed. Instead, the cancer center’s president, Peter Pisters—then on the job for barely a month—signed a voluntary agreement allowing the FBI to search the network accounts of what a separate document indicated were 23 employees “for any purpose … at any time, for any length of time, and at any location.”

Can your employer "voluntarily sign an agreement to permit" (or effectively sign a warrant enabling) the surveillance state to spy on you outside of work contexts? Criticism of the Chinese surveillance state is justified, but before we worry about their surveillance state, perhaps worrying about our own surveillance state would be more in order...

Wait, the deal about this funding is that NIH funds, student does research. The topic of where the researcher uses this is different.

If the US wanted these researchers to utilize their research by creating American businesses, allow them to become American first and create these businesses here? Why let those scientists now take Chinese funding, do research in China and then buy that product from there?

Ultimately, I think the US has shooting itself in the foot if it thinks that money is what tempted those researchers and taking away that money with ethnic targeting will somehow fix trade and IP issues.

Found more surprising is that "A month after resigning, she left her husband and two kids in the U.S. and took a job as dean of a school of public health in Shanghai." Why would one do that?

If one found it impossible to get an appropriate-level job in this country, and were offered one in China, one might take it, mightn't one?

Scientist like Wu needs a clean, unbiased, trusting, politics-free environment to do their work. When that environment turns to one of suspicion and discrimination, of course she choose to leave.

> “Even something that is in the fundamental research space, that’s absolutely not classified, has an intrinsic value,” says Lawrence Tabak, principal deputy director of the NIH, explaining his approach. “This pre-patented material is the antecedent to creating intellectual property. In essence, what you’re doing is stealing other people’s ideas.”

Why are the words "patent" and "intellectual property" coming out of the mouth of someone at the NIH? Everything they do should be a public good.

I love the word "pre-patented" (i.e. not patented). Totally reminds me of pre-crime.

Nationalistic mumbo-jumbo aside, the patent discussion makes it obvious what the real motivations are: it's just another money-grab. "That publicly-funded research is supposed to benefit a small cadre of American pharma rentiers at everyone's expense, not Chinese ones!"

calling basic cancer research a pre-patent sounds like calling the laws of physics "pre-IP". What's next, arrest Chinese physicists for smuggling astronomical data out of the US? This American witch-hunt is becoming increasingly ridiculous.

Public to whom? The citizens of the country funding the research, or to those of a country that steals the result?

US tax payers is fronting $28 billion a year for NIH research. There is a lot of IP coming out of that that belongs to them, and not the Chinese Communist Party. There is such a thing as licensing agreements. Again, there are many successful scientific collaborations between US and China so don't be surprised that among some of these scientists there are some with bad characters tempted to share confidential information.

Even when the NIH funds the research, the resulting drugs/procedures/patents are rarely owned by the Federal Government anymore because of the Bayh-Dole Act.

Unfortunately there is not a clear segmentation here between what NIH funds and what ultimately becomes the product available on the market. NIH often fund basic research, while others pick that up and attempt to make a drug out of it. This is super simplifying it, but it's a complex process with lots of organizations and many funding sources.

In addition to public funding of NIH research, it takes a commercial company (pharma) well beyond $1 billion to get one successful drug on the market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_drug_development

The discoverer of insulin, Frederick Banting, 'sold' his patent for one dollar, to make that life-saving substance available to all.

And yet, somehow, US pharma companies are overcharging diabetics to the tune of thousands of dollars a year for access to a 96-year-old drug.

I'm sure those same pharma companies can figure out how to fleece the public in the distribution of any cancer cures that come out of China.

Why are the taxpayers funding confidential research? If that is going on, then we’ve found the real problem. I’m ok paying for health research that will benefit me and everyone else. I’m not ok funding secret research that some mid level beaurocrat will turn into an IP money grab as soon as they step through the revolving door to the private sector.

I believe all biomedical research conducted at the NIH is subject to the Freedom of Information Act, so I'm not sure confidential is the best term here.

> Everything they do should be a public good.

It seems the main disagreement is on how to define public in this context. Should it be for the good of humanity, or the good of the United States? And, if it's the latter, how can that restriction be enforced?

It's even more ridiculous, from the same article:

>Since 2010 the NIH itself has offered about $5 million a year in special grants for U.S.-China collaborations, with 20% going to cancer research, and a counterpart in China has pitched in an additional $3 million a year.

So ... if we compare average living standards, China seems to be investing more

You know what's ridiculous? That we are giving a single cent for US-China collaborations. That $5M should be going to US researchers only.

I agree and it’s actually the Universities who patent the work, not the NIH.. also it’s not like China would respect the intellectual property anyway... I mean that’s the other side of the argument. Maybe this is a scheme to get the China to start respecting IP.. unfortunately the side effect will be pushing research into China when their most talented won’t work in the USA.

It also is pretty clear in the article that the FBI doesn’t understand cancer research.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act

and even intramural NIH inventions get patented and belong to the government

I wonder if Lawrence Tabak has any personal financial interests in US cancer drug companies.

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