Criminalizing Science Is Really Dumb

Bloomberg Opinion , January 27, 2021

Ever since the Nazis drove Europe’s greatest minds into exile, U.S. science has flourished by attracting talent from overseas. After World War II, the country’s prosperity and openness to immigrant scientists turned “brain drain” into a huge national advantage. Mixing global talent with America’s own made U.S. labs the world’s leading source of scientific discoveries, a status that only intensified with the opening of China to the West.

Now that status is under threat from Chinese ambitions — and the U.S. government’s self-defeating response to them. In a reversal of national identities, China is acting like a keen capitalist employer, wooing Chinese-born scientists with top-of-the-line new labs and lavish funding. The U.S., meanwhile, is taking the authoritarian role, using the threat of high-profile criminal prosecutions to strike fear in the scientific community.

Take the case of Gang Chen, a naturalized U.S. citizen who holds an endowed chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a leading expert on nanotechnology. In the waning days of President Donald Trump’s administration, Chen was arrested and charged with wire fraud, failing to file a foreign bank account report and making a false statement in a tax return, all allegedly attempts to conceal ties to the Chinese government while funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. He pleaded not guilty.

“Our investigation found Chen was working with the Chinese Communist Government in various capacities dating back to 2012, at our country’s expense,” said the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Boston office, Joseph R. Bonavolonta, at a Jan. 14 press conference. “And the real victims in this case are you — the taxpayers — who we believe he knowingly and willfully defrauded out of $19 million in federal grants by exploiting our system to enhance China’s research in nanotechnology.”

It was a deeply misleading statement. For starters, the $19 million went not to Chen but to MIT. The FBI similarly confused personal funds with Chinese funding for a collaboration between MIT and a Chinese university. All of the money was for basic research published openly in scientific journals, not for anything defense-related or hush-hush. And the activities Chen is charged with failing to disclose include things like recommending students for Chinese fellowships and reviewing grant proposals for the Chinese version of the National Science Foundation.

Criminalizing such activities is so extreme that 170 MIT faculty members, including Nobel laureates, have signed a letter supporting Chen. “We are troubled that the complaint against Gang vilifies what would be considered normal academic and research activities, including promoting MIT’s global mission,” it says, concluding, “We are all Gang Chen.”

“Many of us were concerned that appearing in the complaint were normal academic activities that we all engage in all the time,” said neuroscientist Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, in an interview. “The more senior and prominent you are, the more you're asked to give advice, to review grants, review people, become advisers to all kinds of programs and so on. This is what life is like in science. And normally one doesn't give a second thought, or worry that you're going to be arrested by the FBI, if you participate in normal academic activities.”

Chen may have omitted some of his activities from forms, but there’s little evidence he was behaving like a spy. Some of the omissions, such as his alleged failure to report a foreign bank account on his tax forms, occurred in some years but not in others — not exactly the behavior of someone keeping a secret.

Many Americans who think of themselves as perfectly law-abiding, argues civil-liberties and defense lawyer Harvey Silverglate, author of “Three Felonies a Day,” commit such crimes every day and would be vulnerable if federal prosecutors decided to come after them. (Silverglate is also the co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, on whose board I serve.)

“Anyone applying for federal grants, or working in a program that gets federal grants, has to fill out an enormous amount of paperwork,” he explained in an email. “It is very easy to fail to disclose something that the feds can interpret as a ‘material’ and ‘willful and knowing’ omission.” If federal authorities want to target Chinese-American scientists in hopes of hampering China’s ambitions, they have plenty of paperwork to comb through.

As chilling as Chen’s individual case might be, the broader implications for U.S. science are equally disturbing. Such prosecutions send the message that Chinese-born researchers shouldn’t stay in the U.S., or even come here in the first place. They can even encourage other foreign scientists to seek employment elsewhere.

“It's a question of national security,” said Yoel Fink, the MIT materials science professor who organized the letter. “Being able to acquire global talent, and attract global talent to the country, is a matter of national security. I like to think about it as, imagine the NBA without Giannis [Antetokounmpo]. Imagine the NBA without [Kristaps] Porzingis. Imagine the NBA without all the international players. Who in their right mind turns away talent?” Driving star players into the arms of your rivals is not a winning strategy.