Fifty-four scientist have lost their jobs as the National Institute of Health probes foreign connections.
A senior advisory pannell with the National Institute of Health’s extramural research gave a presentation that detailed an effort NIH launched in August 2018 that has resulted in criminal charges against some prominent researchers that include Charles Lieber, chair of Harvard University’s department of chemistry and chemical biology.
“It’s not what we had hoped, and it’s not a fun task,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in characterizing the ongoing investigation. He called the data “sobering.”
The investigation has revealed that the vast majority of those targeted by the Chinese are Asian men in their 50’s, with a median age of 56. The youngest was 48 and the oldest 59… Apparently their foreign talent recruitment program has determined that men in that age range are the most vulnerable targets.
Of those under investigation about three-quarters of them had active grants from the National Institute of Health and almost half of them had at least two grants totalling some $164 million dollars.
About 70% or 133 researchers failed to disclose to the NIH that they had received a foreign grant, fifty-four percent failed to disclose participation in a foreign talent program, nine percent had direct ties to a foreign company, four percent had undisclosed foreign patents and about five percent of the cases involved a violation of NIH’s peer-review system.
There are a total of 399 scientist that the NIH has concerns about and the Federal Bureau of Investigations zeroed in on 121 of them and an additional 44 have been flagged by their own institutions.
It’s about time our government started taking this sort of threat by the Chinese serious and cracking down on Americans who are willing to betray their country. There are some bills pending in Congress that would help limit the flow of scientific talent, i.e., Chinese spies from China to the United States but I’m glad they are not waiting on Congress to do something about this because by the time they act China would have recruited every Scientist in America with access to the information they want…
