For their part, critics believe they are guilty of serious misconduct. Lieber is said to have enrolled in China’s Thousand Talents Plan – a program aimed at attracting top scientists – and paid a lot of money to set up a research center at Wuhan University of Technology, but hid a deal with US aid agencies when asked about it (read the verdict Pano). Lieber faces six charges: two counts of felony criminal mischief, two counts of felony criminal mischief, and two counts of felony criminal mischief.
“In short, the government will show that Lieber deliberately lied … in order to protect his reputation and career at Harvard University,” prosecutors wrote in a summary of the lawsuits filed last week.
In response, Marc Mukasey’s lawyer said the government could not prove Lieber “acted deliberately, intentionally, or deliberately, or that he lied.”
Lieber is one of the highest paid students in the China Initiative and one of only a handful of non-Chinese people.
Lieber’s lawsuit could be against the government, which has a number of similar cases pending against US professors who say they have not disclosed their Chinese alliances with aid agencies.
Andrew Lelling, a former U.S. attorney general in the Massachusetts District who served on the China Initiative’s steering committee before leaving the government for secrecy, said he would not comment on any of the cases, but said he expected the government to take action. successful in litigation like Lieber going forward.
“My opinion is that research-related cases often make the state a success. They are very late because of covid, then you have a lot of unresolved cases, but I think you will see that the government wins most of them,” Lelling told MIT Technology Review.
China Initiative
The China Initiative was announced in 2018 by Jeff Sessions, Trump’s former attorney general, as part of China’s central government crisis.
The MIT Technology Review survey was published earlier this month found the China Initiative and an umbrella of various Chinese-related crimes, and targets from a Chinese national who carried out a smuggling operation for government-backed terrorists who are believed to be the most disruptive of history. Overall, MIT Technology Review identified 77 cases; of them, one-fourth have caused criticism or criticism, but nearly two-thirds still remain.
The government’s prosecution of investigators like Lieber for concealing relations with Chinese corporations has been a source of controversy, and is growing rapidly, in government experiments. By 2020, half of the 31 new cases brought under the China Initiative were cases against scientists or researchers. The lawsuit was probably funded by antitrust lawsuit.
Last fall, hundreds of students across the country, from institutions including Stanford University and Princeton University, he signs a letter summoning Attorney General Merrick Garland to end the China Initiative. The project, they wrote, has deviated from its original goal of cracking down on the theft of Chinese intellectual property and instead undermines the American research competition by barring experts from coming or staying in the US.
Some of the cases that have led to criminal activity:
- Xiao-Jiang Li, a former professor of Emory University who studied genetics, pleaded guilty to one count of false tax evasion in May 2020. He was sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay $ 30,000 in restitution. He is currently a researcher at the China National Academy of Sciences.
- Song Guo Zheng, a former professor of Ohio State University, pleaded guilty in November 2020 to one count of lying to investigators of his relationship with a Chinese university and the Dousand Talents Plan. Zheng, who studied autoimmune disease, was sentenced to 37 months in prison last summer and ordered to pay $ 4 million in restitution to the National Institutes of Health and his employers.
After Zheng’s ruling, the state attorney general said he hoped his future would be a message for other academics. Vipal J. Patel, a U.S. attorney for the state of Southern Ohio, stated: “We hope that Zheng’s arrest may cause some to disagree with China’s actions on the ‘Thousand Talents Plan’ or disagree with other rules.
Science on trial
Lieber case is the second Chinese Initiative case for a student to go to court. The only former defendant to be charged in connection with the investigation, University of Tennessee-Knoxville professor Anming Hu, was. release on all charges by a judge in June after the judges have ruled in their favor.
There are five more pending cases pending in our US University of Occupation Trial. (To hear a list of case-related cases, click Pano. To access the entire China Initiative database, click Pano.)
This includes the story of Gang Chen, an MIT professor arrested at Boston’s Logan Airport in 2020, who is also accused of defrauding lenders and failing to disclose foreign bank accounts. (MIT, which pays for Chen’s security, says the main agreement that existed was the agreement they entered into.)
Nanowires
Lieber, who is now on paid leave from Harvard, ran a well-known lab that makes silicon nanowires electric, lasers, and neural mesh. injection into the brain as a form of brain-computer.
Lieber’s 2015 paper on neural mesh was similar to what his lab produced because almost everyone there – 10 of the 13 authors – had a Chinese name. They were Harvard PhD students and postdocs, many of whom were recruited from China for higher positions in advanced chemistry and were trained as the next generation of scientists.
David Liu, a geneticist who is also a professor in the chemistry department at Harvard, said he did not follow Lieber’s rules. “But I can say that in addition to being a very good scientist,” he says, “Charlie was a kind and devoted teacher to his students and young friends, and a man who worked hard and unselfishly to help others.”