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NIH, FBI Accuse Scientists in US of Sending IP to China, Running Shadow Labs

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:31PM   
from the years-of-probing-I-tell-you dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas has forced out three senior researchers with ties to China. The move comes amid nationwide investigations by federal officials into whether researchers are pilfering intellectual property from US research institutions and running "shadow laboratories" abroad, according to a joint report by Science magazine and the Houston Chronicle.

The National Institutes of Health began sending letters to the elite cancer center last August regarding the conduct of five researchers there. The letters discussed "serious violations" of NIH policies, including leaking confidential NIH grant proposals under peer review to individuals in China, failing to disclose financial ties in China, and other conflicts of interest. MD Anderson moved to terminate three of those researchers, two of whom resigned during the termination process. The center cleared the fourth and is still investigation[sic] the fifth.

The move follows years of probing from the FBI, which first contacted MD Anderson back in 2015 with such concerns, according to MD Anderson President Dr. Peter Pisters. In December 2017, MD Anderson handed over hard drives containing employee emails to FBI investigators. That same year, a report by the US Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property used some rough calculations to estimate that IP theft by all parties cost the country upward of $225 billion, potentially as high as $600 billion, each year. The report called China the "world's principal IP infringer."

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/nih-fbi-accuse-scientists-in-us-of-sending-ip-to-china-running-shadow-labs/

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Original Submission

• Ok, I read the summary Ok, I read the summary (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday April 25 2019, @12:12AM (1 child)

  by khallow (3766) on Thursday April 25 2019, @12:12AM (#834564) Journal

  There was all this talk about what was going on, so I read the summary.

  The letters discussed "serious violations" of NIH policies, including leaking confidential NIH grant proposals under peer review to individuals in China, failing to disclose financial ties in China, and other conflicts of interest.

  So we have leaking confidential information about grant proposals - which can help rival research groups unfairly. The latter though is more significant in that the disclosure rules are intended to forestall a huge variety of shenanigans. Imagine funding research for tobacco related cancer risks where the researchers fail to disclose that they are heavily funded by big tobacco firms. That particular bit of fraud can result in propaganda rather than sincere research all on the public dime. Also researchers might be prohibited from patenting publicly funded research, but not private businesses which happen to get informed by an insider before the research becomes public - that creates a nice window of opportunity.

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• Re:Ok, I read the summary (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @12:59AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 25 2019, @12:59AM (#834578)

  Ok, I read the summary

  Nasty, disgusting habit.

  Parent