A former board member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) McGovern Institute for Brain Research has resigned her position and written an op-ed in The Wall Street JournalThese thoughts shed light on not only how American universities collaborated with China in scientific advances, but also on how they shut down critics of these partnerships. This may even give insight into the origins of COVID-19.
Michelle Bethel, stepdaughter of the Institute’s namesake, said she had long felt uneasy with the partnership between MIT’s brain study institute and the Chinese government after she witnessed changes in the Asian nation following her seven years living there beginning in 2006.
China is a country I love and have a deep affection. My husband and I moved to Shanghai in 2006. After seven years of marriage, I moved to Shanghai with my husband. There I had three children and learned both the culture and the language.
However, times have changed. The Communist Party has reasserted itself in every aspect of China’s society—economic, social, cultural and, yes, scientific. MIT and McGovern Institute have not been able to closely examine these developments. I believe that MIT doesn’t have a firm grasp on events in China or on the risks of partnerships with Chinese institutions in cutting-edge areas of science that are subject to misappropriation or abuse for military modernization or repression.
After reading a report in Reuters about a Danish partnership with China, and recalling that the Chinese military had ” published articles declaring biology a new domain of warfare,” Bethel took her concerns to other board members. What were their responses? Those kinds of concerns might be perceived as “racist” and that objections to working with China ran counter to the idea that “scientific progress is paramount.”
(Those looking to understand why Anthony Fauci, The EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology might have reached an agreement to pay for highly risky gain of functions research may find the explanation in the second part of the sentence.
Bethel’s op-ed also points out another disturbing fact: working with the Chinese government on some of these projects often requires a contractual obligation to aid and advance the Chinese military.
The Chinese Communist Party, in pursuing what it calls “military-civil fusion,” has passed laws stating that all institutions, including those in partnerships with Western universities, are obligated to serve the modernization of the Chinese military. This requirement and the Party’s opacity make it hard to ascertain if the PLA is using our research.
There is a lot to know about the deceitfulness of Chinese researchers. Charles Lieber is a Harvard chair of the Harvard Department and was indicted in January 2020 for lying about his connections with China. He will be facing six felonies in December. Lieber will seek to prove he did not lie to the Defense Department and the National Institutes of Health about his relationship to China’s Thousand Talents Plan, a recruitment program FBI Director Chris Wray has noted is used “to entice scientists to secretly bring our knowledge and innovation back to China—even if that means stealing proprietary information or violating our export controls and conflict-of-interest rules.”
Other high-profile cases like Lieber’s include those of Yanqing Ye, a Boston University robotics researcher, who lied about being a member of the Chinese army while posing as a student; and cancer researcher Zaosong Zheng, who was arrested in a U.S. airport while allegedly trying to return to China with vials of biological samples in his luggage.
There are many others.
Bethel’s resignation and warning are coming at a time when the nation — and possibly the world — is starting to grapple with whether or not it thinks scientific progress is, in fact, paramount — and whether or not it should be comfortable serving as the lab rats in the grand experiment.
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