Prosecutors accuse Harvard scientist of lying about receiving money from China
Early Tuesday morning, FBI agents arrived at two of the most protected corners of Harvard University’s academic cloister, raking through a gabled house in the suburb of Lexington and a neoclassical brick building in Cambridge.
By afternoon, one of Harvard’s scientific luminaries was in handcuffs, charged with making a false statement to federal authorities about his financial relationship with the Chinese government, and especially his participation in its Thousand Taldemic ents program, a campaign to attract foreign-educated scientists to China.
The arrest of Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, signaled a new, aggressive phase in the Justice Department’s campaign to root out scientists who are stealing research from American laboratories.
For months, news has been trickling out about the prosecution of scientists, mainly Chinese graduate students and researchers working in American laboratories. But Lieber represents a different kind of target, a star researcher who had risen to the highest reaches of the U.S. aca
hierarchy.
Lieber, a leader in the field of nanoscale electronics, has not been accused of sharing sensitive information with Chinese officials, but rather of hiding — from Harvard, from the National Institutes of Health, and from the Defense Department — the amount of money that Chinese funders were paying him.
Lieber’s lawyer, Peter Levitt, made no comments after a preliminary hearing in federal court in Boston on Tuesday.
The arrest sent shock waves through research circles.
“This is a very, very highly esteemed, highly regarded investigator working at
Harvard, a major U.S. institution, at the highest rank he could have, so, all the success you can have in this sphere,” said Dr. Ross McKinney Jr., chief scientific officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges. “It’s like, when you’ve got it all, why do you want more?”
McKinney described anxiety among his colleagues that scientists will be scrutinized over legitimate sources of international funding.
“We worry that, slowly but surely, we’re going to have something of a McCarthy-ish purity testing,” he said. “He’s being criminally charged. This is a big deal. He could end up in jail.”
Lieber, 60, was charged with one count of making a false or misleading statement, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Harvard said Lieber had been placed on indefinite administrative leave.