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Background
Dr. Lieber, now 64, had been chairman of Harvard’s chemistry and chemical biology division. For his work on nanotechnology, he had been seen by some as a contender for the Nobel Prize.
Since 2008, prosecutors stated, his laboratory at Harvard had acquired analysis grants totaling $18 million from the Division of Protection and the Nationwide Institutes of Well being.
However he additionally secretly accepted cash from China, which had established a authorities initiative, the Thousand Skills program, to achieve entry to scientific information and experience, typically paying scientists lavishly.
When questioned about his involvement with Thousand Skills in 2018 by federal investigators, he denied it. He additionally didn’t report his revenue to the I.R.S.
However the Justice Division discovered that Dr. Lieber had a three-year contract with Thousand Skills, below which he agreed to determine a analysis lab at Wuhan College and to publish articles, manage worldwide conferences and apply for patents on the college’s behalf.
The college agreed to pay him as much as $50,000 a month as a wage and to supply residing bills of as much as $150,000.
At his trial he stated {that a} portion of his wage was deposited in a Chinese language checking account. The remaining, between $50,000 and $100,000, was paid in $100 payments.
“They might give me a package deal, a brown factor with some Chinese language characters on it, I might throw it in my bag,” he stated on the trial. After returning house, he stated, “I didn’t declare it, and that’s unlawful.”
At his trial he confessed that cash was not the lure — it was the chance to advance his profession.
“That is embarrassing,” he stated at his trial. “Each scientist needs to win a Nobel Prize.”
His legal professionals, noting that he has an incurable blood most cancers, had requested that he be sentenced to probation or house confinement as a substitute of serving time in jail.
Why It Issues
Dr. Lieber’s conviction in December 2021 resulted from the China Initiative, an effort launched in 2018, below the Trump administration, to establish scientists suspected of sharing delicate info with China.
In early 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation stated it had greater than 2,000 open investigations associated to theft from China of knowledge and expertise from america.
However critics stated that the China Initiative had unfairly focused educational researchers of Asian descent. Whereas the initiative led to the conviction of Dr. Lieber and different researchers, one other prosecution of a Massachusetts Institute of Know-how scientist, Gang Chen, was dismissed.
In February 2022, the Justice Division ended the trouble, with one official, Matthew G. Olsen, saying it “helped give rise to a dangerous notion that the division applies a decrease customary to research and prosecute prison conduct associated to that nation or that we not directly view individuals with racial, ethnic or familial ties to China in another way.”
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