Supposing they were spying, what’s the edge that China gets since NIH research gets published publicly anyway?
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.
There is no reason for the researchers to hide payments from China if they were honest and the NIH obviously agrees.