Scientists have lost their jobs after NIH probe into foreign ties
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
1. Are these as egregious as we are led to believe? 2. Are these really a sign of deep foreign influence? 3. Can it be that these are actually just minor oversights of a large number of individuals without needing to jump to the worst conclusion of these scientists being spies (as one other comment has already asserted)?
I am not trying to water down what may be a serious case of foreign influence, but if this is something common and/or easy to fall into, it's possible this is an overreaction and may cause harm to the research community. The article is worded in a way that doesn't clarify if the focus was only on Chinese influence or if this was broadly designed to capture any foreign influence.
I ask these questions to broaden the discussion because oftentimes research and academic centers can have overly broad requests on disclosure which can be very invasive and, truth be told, if everyone answered fully and clearly, a lot of people would probably be excluded, and that begs the question if these are essential or not in my humble opinion.
To be clear, I am very much for limiting foreign influence on domestic policy, whether it's via research or otherwise, but I think it bears practicing greater skepticism when something may just be a proxy for "action" rather than sincere positive results.
"Lauer also presented data on the nature of the violations that NIH has uncovered. Some 70% (133) of the researchers had failed to disclose to NIH the receipt of a foreign grant, and 54% had failed to disclose participation in a foreign talent program. In contrast, Lauer said, only 9% hid ties to a foreign company, and only 4% had an undisclosed foreign patent. Some 5% of cases involved a violation of NIH’s peer-review system."
So sounds like ~90% of the 189 violations maybe just not checking a box. It's not clear to me what the violations were for the 54 people who were fired.
From where I sit, science espionage from China certainly sounds plausible (And should be dealt with), but ginning up negligible issues to get rid of the wrong kind of people is a completely plausible move from the current administration.
There are definitely paperwork errors I can imagine, but it's difficult to imagine it being as simple a mistake as not checking the box that says "you have a job". More likely would be a grant office not being fully aware of a professors' funding sources or miscategorizing their funding in such a way that the grant office person helping with the paperwork marked it wrong and the professor didn't check carefully.
That I would consider to be an "honest mistake" that gets corrected by moving money around and a strongly worried letter.
Other stories I've heard go as far as two married professors who took their grant money and used it instead to move to an island resort for three months or something like that and didn't actually do the project at all. That was definitely a crime, but largely only because it involved the federal government. If they'd gotten a grant from a private company and didn't do what they promised it would likely be a civil lawsuit unless it rose to the level of actual illegal fraud.
1) Trump or someone else in the WH becomes convinced that the NIH is full of Chinese spies
2) Some poor flak winds up with the job of producing some spies to fire, or else
3) We wind up with this weak sauce
You know who would have absolutely none of these paperwork gaps? An actual spy.
I'm not sure what you mean by mis-direction.
It's a political decision, entirely. Meanwhile, Trump has been escalating the treatment of China as a spying, cold-war-style enemy (and thus rehabilitating Russia from that role).
Like when you file you taxes and your only mistake is to forget to check that box that says you had a job?
The Talents program comes with a lot of perks, some of which would be a pretty big deal to lie about. Like committing for 1-2 months in the summer in China, then telling the NIH you are available full-time in the summer also.
Having gotten grants and attended the "if you lie about using US money it is a felony" mandatory in person talk...
Well, it's not necessarily that they had foreign grants, though it is possible that would have made them ineligible for something. But not disclosing stuff like that is really bad.
I don't know why they didn't, the reasons might be innocuous in which case I doubt there would be harsh punishments.
Or maybe they got two grants from different governments paying for the same research (big no) or maybe they were simply given money by a foreign asset that now can blackmail them into disclosing secret research that the US funded.
The article doesn't really give that level of detail so I can only say it ranges from "mistake on your taxes" bad where the repercussions are mostly financial penalities and "stole money and gave nuclear missile designs to a foreign country because of the influence of their money".
If I were to bet: they either didn't keep good track of things, are the kind of people that simply don't care about the rules enough to know they broke them (even though they don't intend harm it's definitely their fault), or they would have been ineligible for funding if they disclosed the foreign source and were too greedy to take a pass on it.
Your comment would be fine without the first sentence. (It might be even better with the last sentence, which is redundant and starts to feel like a cross-examination, but that one is not a big deal.)
At the same time, I know it leads to confusion sometimes, and I'm sorry about that.
The primary task of a PI these days is to write grant applications.
That's what makes it a possible felony.
If they disclosed the funding source it is possible they wouldn't have access to as many grants. But they can just... not take money that they aren't eligible for.
I'm finding it hard to drum up much sympathy for signing documents that state things you should have known weren't true.
There are valid excuses that make it more a paperwork oversight than industrial espionage for sure. But this article didn't give enough detail to know what percentage were oversights versus knowing deception.
Don't lie on paperwork you send to the feds.
You obviously have never worked in science.
"If you get money from the USA, there is no law saying that you cannot get money from China."
The USA does not give money to you. The NIH does. Darpa too and many others. This government institutions have their own rules and regulations.
"The science is the same and the money is the same. What the US is trying to do is to stop innovation and criminalize the collaboration with Chinese institutions."
The US is trying to control the hemorrhaging outflow of US taxpayer funded research.
The vast majority of research fits between those camps, in fact.
Most research isn't classified, but that doesn't mean most research is open.
I am pretty sure it is intentionally vague so that people assume it's worse than it is since they could have just reported the numbers of people they uncovered to be doing something sinister if it fit the narrative.
But I'd lean the exact opposite direction and say that this article has nothing, on its face, to do with hemorrhaging, industrial espionage, or state espionage.
I work in HPC and people are getting into machine learning now. Lots of papers are getting published that do not contain enough information to reproduce the work and source code is held tight. That's not uncommon is a lot of the sciences. Results are public, but how to get the results are not exactly. I've also been in the engineering and physics fields. Papers there are really not reproducible. They may detail a high level overview of how to do the experiment but they leave out all the "secret sauce". This gives them an edge.
So with the other post that made the front page, just the other day, it detailed how someone got stopped at the border for lying on the visa and that that person was sending pictures and very low level detailed explanations about the lab and its setup. This is essentially the "secret sauce" we're talking about here. If these researchers want to turn their results into a company (say you invent a new drug) you can only do this if you don't tell everyone every detail (which you can't reasonably do in a 10 page journal paper).
This all is especially true for medical work and semiconductor work. The US government is funding many of these labs because they actually want them to do the low level research, make a product, and market it. You can think of it as angel investing (except you don't have to give up shares of the company). But they want it to be a US company that builds and makes the product because that helps the US economy. If the US does the "angel investing" and then the product is created in China by a Chinese company, then that investing was not nearly as useful.
Generally speaking:
- It's typically okay to receive money from foreign companies and foreign-owned businesses/organizations. Both culturally and legally. E.g., the government explicitly black-lists instead of white-lists.
- Forgetting to report small amounts of money (low five figures at a time) can be chalked up to sloppiness, even if the total amount adds up to six figures over a long period of time. E.g., just as a graduate student I received mid five figures worth of travel grants and honorariums from a half dozen different funding agencies, many of them foreign-owned. As a more senior researcher I now keep track of every penny in and out of my group, but many of my colleagues do not. And that's reasonable -- they effectively run small consulting shops with seven figure annual budgets and were never taught how to run a small business! Don't get me wrong, they should be way more serious about these things (and most people now realize this), but there's lots of failure to report that IMO doesn't rise to the level of fraud or criminal conspiracy.
- Forgetting to report larger funding streams (six figures/yr for multiple years, or any funding stream that adds up to more than maybe a half million) is either fraud or at least such inexcusable oversight that firing is perhaps not an unreasonable action.
- This all gets more complicated if the funding was received "on the side" (i.e., not through the university). Note: it is 100% Ok and even normal for professors to do consulting/advising on the side. To be clear, they still need to report this funding. But, again, it's super believable that someone could forget to report or not know they were supposed to report for a side gig.
- Similarly, this all gets more complicated if the funding was received many years ago and was not a huge sum. E.g., did I receive any money from <insert random European country> while doing my PhD or the first couple years afterward? No fucking clue, that entire time of life was a whirlwind and no one trained me to keep track of such things.
Further, they likely breached their ethics policy which is usually the part of their contract, employment agreement, etc
^ These apply regardless of the source.
Now considering the source, you have to investigate if they disclosed or were asked to disclose information on the policies, studies, etc they came in contact with.
Alternatively, did they adjust or were they asked to adjust their positions, policies, studies, etc that they were involved in?
^ Turns out those apply regardless of the source too.
In the most charitable explanation, they were incredibly sloppy multiple times in multiple ways. In the worst explanation, they committed espionage and/or damaged the entire process. The answer is likely somewhere in between.
The question is the nature of the wrongness. Was it some trivial clerical error being painted as treason by insane anti-China zealots? Or did what they do actually rise to the level of fraud/treason? I.e., is this communist witch hunt v 2.0, or did these scientists really deserve to be fired/face criminal charges?
And, again, I don't think an answer to that question is possible without looking at each case individually. Anyone claiming to have an answer without going case-by-case is in over their head.
The rest of your post is wild speculation about the nature of the foreign talents program and level of involvement in that program of particular individuals.
Right. And even unintentionally is quite bad. But also not even close to uncommon.
I don't think the question was "was what these people did bad?" I think the question was "is what these people did really _that_ bad?"
So then why the focus on foreign grants? From the article:
> [Of the scientists who were fired/resigned] Some 70% (133) of the researchers had failed to disclose to NIH the receipt of a foreign grant, and 54% had failed to disclose participation in a foreign talent program. In contrast, Lauer said, only 9% hid ties to a foreign company, and only 4% had an undisclosed foreign patent. Some 5% of cases involved a violation of NIH’s peer-review system.
Although results and information about the research are often published to the public, experimental setup and some technical details are usually not included in the publication. Just because a paper on the research will eventually be available to the public doesn't mean the technology can be easily replicated. The concern here is that the real hard work that comes from months of trial and error is being stolen to competing nations that would take advantage of the theft to claim the author of such technology. Not to mention the tech is funded by American taxpayer dollars and developed by scientists who spent years and months on it. There's a recent incident on a Chinese Scientist lying about his affiliation with the Chinese Military and have been sending proprietary lab information to China.
See: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/11/alleged-chinese...
But for real IP, in the US if you publish something you get a year to patent it. In many other places you have to patent it before you publish. So if you get their info before they have published it yet you can file the patent first.
The US used to be first-to-invent but now its also first-to-file like in the EU countries.
In the EU, you have to file the patent first before publishing.
I have to admit it sure sounds like it's the opposite of first-to-file in the US, at least for the first year, but those are the rules.
But once you publish the invention, others should not be able to patent the idea anymore as there is prior art (your publication) and patents are required to be novel. This leaves you as the only person who can patent it.
There is no reason for the researchers to hide payments from China if they were honest and the NIH obviously agrees.
Not unlike what Coca-Cola has been doing to nutrition science.[]
[] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/how-coca-cola-disguised-its...
U.S. funding here is obvious and understood. It’s a government body. Calling conspiracy here is disingenuous. It’s effectively disclosed and can be evaluated.
The problem is that these foreign ties were not disclosed. They can’t be evaluated.
The issue isn't that these scientists received money from a foreign government. It's that they failed to report it.
The US worships corporations so unfortunately this is not an actionable issue.
It's not unusual for it to take 6-12 months to publish after all the work is done.
Plus, there is often information which isn't published which is critical to the science.
Because?
There's a lot of ways and it is dependent on what is being researched.
For example, if you are researching drugs you don't say everything about how to make that drug. In fact, you can't really in a 10 page report if you also want to show results (which is what the focus is on). Typically the "how" is kept more secret, because then it can be commercialized. This is their "secret sauce." Everyone can taste it and see it, but that doesn't mean you know how it is made and to recreate it takes a lot of time and research. If you made it first, you have a big head start, even if it doesn't stay secret for long. So the question as a US citizen here is "The US funded this research through tax payer money, do you want a Chinese company producing the drug or an American?" Or I can rephrase that as "Which country gets the economic benefits from production of said product?" Obviously a government doesn't like investing in something that another country is going to reap all the benefits from.
Researchers frequently have custom and specialty equipment. Frequently to invent things you need to invent other things along the way. You aren't going to publish a paper on the method you used to keep a solution at a constant temperature and mixing level, but that machine may be essential to making the product. In fact, many of the people in the lab would have no idea how to recreate that machine (only one person knows). So if pictures are being taken so that it can be reverse engineered, this is definitely academic espionage.
There's also academic scooping. As much as people don't talk about it, it happens a lot. Imagine working on a project for a year and then some other lab produces the same thing you have and publishes first. Your research can be done overnight because you need to be published. You might even have a better product but if it can be difficult to prove that yours is so much better that a rushed and lower quality product can win. This means they can also get the patents and rights to that thing if it is commercializable.
There's other ways too, but I believe these would be the most common.
Ideally science would be a borderless fraternity/sorority... I wonder how bureaucrats and politicians manage to override scientist's own values as such to indoctrinate them with patriotism?
“Of course the people don’t want war. But (...) all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”
— Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
referring to chinese ip-stealing?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...
This was one of Snowden's big revelations - America had been using Crypto AG (a Swiss company) to infiltrate and usurp countless other foreign businesses, to give American companies a distinct advantage - FOR DECADES, since the 70's!!! (Also, it is quite well known that the CIA runs Germany's BND. Does China's intelligence agency run the intelligence agencies of any other sovereign nation, that you know of?)
This is the pot. And the kettle is also black, btw.
I could not find any mention of secrets being shared with companies in the (very long) article you linked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#Industria...
Find out what Edward Snowden has to say about it:
https://www.bbc.com/news/25907502
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-snowden-germany/...
.. and then, if you're still so interested, investigate what was stolen from Siemens (Germany) and Petrobras (Brasil) and France Telecom ..
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1995/05/help-wanted-spy...
Careful, though. Its probably illegal for American citizens to find out too much about this.
If the US were really treated the way it treats other countries, Chicago would be a pile of smoking ruin and a sizeable portion of the American population would be trying to find refuge.
Secretary of State and former CIA director Mike Pompeo: "we lied, we cheated, we stole..."
It seems to be a common frame among those defending China that the US is still the way it was in the 1950s. Which I guess makes sense, given that under Xi China is descending into a type of Neo-Maoism. I imagine Chinese propagandists are dusting off a lot of the old talking points.
At any rate, China's "mistake" from that perspective is that they integrated Capitalism as much as they have over the last 40 years. They are no longer viewed as a "Communist" threat by many Americans, they're viewed (correctly) as a dictatorship. There is no philosophical debate to be had, the Chinese love capitalism just as much as Americans do. No, they're just a straight-up underhanded dictatorship trying to seize as much power as it can. Americans know how to process that sort of threat.
It seems to be a common frame among those attacking China that China is still the way it was in the 1950s. Which I guess makes sense, given that under Trump/Obama, the US is descending back into McCarthyism. I imagine American propagandists are dusting off a lot of the old talking points.
From my experience, the general American public still think China is communist. I agree regarding China and capitalism, but a dictatorship it is not. If you were to compare China's foreign policy with that of the US, it fairly obvious that China is simply trying to build itself up through economic means, but the US feels threatened by the competition so it uses underhanded tactics such as smearing China in every MSM outlet, banning US companies from doing business with Chinese companies, banning Chinese technology, etc. It's almost identical to what it did to Japan back in the days which is why you're running Intel or AMD today instead of Fujitsu, Hitachi, Toshiba.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43361276 https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/02/asia/xinjiang-ch... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-52765838
If it walks like duck and talks like a duck it must totally not be a dictatorship. /s
I guess that means China shouldn't be allowed to geopolitically compete with any nation other than Taiwan and Singapore, given that Han Chinese are an ethnic minority everywhere else. Fine by me if that's your perspective.
The US Government has had a history of targeting (in hindsight) unrelated people in their efforts to "curb foreign influence". See the history of Japanese Internment camps and the McCarthyist Red Scare. This is taught in most US highschools.
We even see the same illogical reasoning being carried out in this comment section (ironically by non-Americans), where any argument against this political culling is dismissed as "CCP Propaganda" and any attempt to point out that the tensions between the US and Russia/Japan/China are unnecessary are met with generic references to past "hostilities" but never specific examples.
The reality is it's possible to condemn any given government and its actions and its agents in that capacity, while saying nothing about a people.
I agree, their position is so weak as to not withstand debate, so they fear debate and resort to deflections like this.
For example read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen
This was a scientist who was forced out in the 50ies and he ended up founding modern Chinese rocketry, including their ICBMs. Of course they would have eventually done it anyways, but it would have likely taken longer.
why? what was he waiting for?
So this conclusion was drawn based on speculation that he was complacent person?
> FAANG engineers have grand startup plans but are comfortable with their jobs
In this case he got a job with another govt agency( Chinese ) so equivalent would be FANG engineers getting a job in another FANG company, which they do all the time.
> Of course [China] would have [had an ICBM program] anyways, but it would have likely taken longer.
rather than
> Of course [Qian Xuesen] would have [defected] anyways, but it would have likely taken longer.
No idea what Xuesen would have done without McCarthyism, but he might have well ended up staying in the US.
At the very least, I think people should be aware this may be happening.
Those who the investigation found had disclosed their funding sources were from other countries didn’t seem to be impacted.
Based on this, many foreign researchers that cooperates with the United Stated, and there are several thousands of them, should be severely punished in his/her country of origin. Most researchers in foreign countries cooperate with American research organizations that transfer technology to US the industry. Just for an example, my home country exchanges information about the Amazon with American institutions, and much of that information is passed on to pharmaceutical companies operating around the world. This is a despicable action that targets China in a way that is racist and hypocrite.
You're literally doing that but for the US. The families of countless people killed by the US in its illegal wars over just the past several decades would disagree with you, if they haven't been wiped out themselves. Same goes for the countless people that starved to death from US sanctions because their government refused to bow to the US empire.
Do you actually believe that the Chinese government would find it acceptable if U.S. scientists working in Chinese labs hid their ties with the U.S. government?
Since we are talking about China, they have been launching programs that "recruits" foreign talents or foreign-trained Chinese talents to participate in technological development in China. However, participant of the program has been reported to partake in intellectual theft, especially sensitive/proprietary technologies [1].
I am giving NIH the benefit of the doubt here since IP theft has been a real problem for the US, especially with technology transfer to China. I don't think this is racist at all because it's a matter of curbing IP thefts and taking a precaution on growing aggression of a country that happens to be 91.6% ethnically Han Chinese people[2].
Source: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
There was a controversy not long ago about Saudi funding. Some very mediocre Saudi universities were entering the top rankings for research because they paid a lot of well known professors to have affiliate positions at those universities. This suddenly caused a crazy boost in rankings.
Now I doubt those researchers failed to disclose their affiliation/funding (the whole point of the scheme was for them to openly be affiliated). But if they had, would the US government go after them?
> Even more surprising, though, was that a little-known university in Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz University, or KAU, ranked seventh in the world in mathematics — despite the fact that it didn’t have a doctorate program in math until two years ago.
https://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/05/citations-sale/
http://blogs.nature.com/houseofwisdom/2012/01/are-saudi-univ...
> In 93% of those cases, the hidden funding came from a Chinese institution.
54 * 0.07 = 3.78 non-Chinese scientists
(I'm guessing the 93% has been rounded)
Edit: nevermind the number 54 was total termination, the 93% was 175/189 of "Scientists NIH contacted institution" where Chinese https://acd.od.nih.gov/documents/presentations/06122020Forei...