Coronavirus cases Chinese Scientist Is Accused of
Smuggling Lab Samples to China
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Zaosong Zheng was preparing
to board Hainan Airlines Flight 482, nonstop from Boston to Beijing, when
customs officers pulled him aside.
Inside his checked luggage,
wrapped in a plastic bag and then inserted into a sock, the officers found what
they were looking for: 21 vials of brown liquid — cancer cells — that the
authorities say Mr. Zheng, 29, a cancer
researcher,
took from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Under questioning, court
documents say, Mr. Zheng acknowledged that he had stolen eight of the samples
and had replicated 11 more based on a colleague’s research. When he returned to
China, he said, he would take the samples to Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital and
turbocharge his career by publishing the results in China, under his own name.
Mr.
Zheng’s arrest on Dec. 10 signified an escalation in the F.B.I.’s efforts to root out scientists
who, the authorities say, are stealing research from American laboratories. Federal prosecutors warn
that he may be charged with transporting stolen goods or with the theft of
trade secrets, a felony that brings a prison term of up to 10 years.
At a hearing on Monday,
Magistrate Judge David Hennessy granted prosecutors’ wish to hold Mr. Zheng
without bail, noting that the theft appeared to have the support of the Chinese
government. Two other Chinese scientists who worked in the same lab as Mr.
Zheng had successfully smuggled stolen biological material out of the country,
prosecutors say.
Mr. Zheng’s case is the
first to unfold in the laboratories clustered around Harvard University, but it
is not likely to be the last. Federal officials are investigating hundreds of cases involving the
potential theft of intellectual property by visiting scientists, nearly all of
them Chinese nationals.
Christopher Wray, director
of the F.B.I., described the researchers as “nontraditional collectors” of
intelligence acting at the behest of the Chinese government, part of a
collective effort to “steal their way up the economic ladder at our expense.”
Dr. Ross McKinney Jr.,
chief scientific officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, said
the actions Mr. Zheng was accused of were especially bold.
“This
is one of the few cases where there’s been stealing of physical material as
well as the stealing of ideas,” he said. “It’s an escalation over most of what
we’ve been seeing.”
Researchers of Chinese
descent make up nearly half of the work force in American research
laboratories, in part because American-born scientists are drawn to the private
sector and less interested in academic careers, Dr. McKinney said. Among the
6,000 Chinese scientists who have received grants from the National Institutes
of Health, around 180 are under investigation for possible violation of
intellectual property law, he said.
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