April 19, 2019
Table of Contents
Purge of Chinese Cancer Researchers
Overview
In April 2019, the Houston Chronicle and Science collaborated to produce a series of alarming reports on the targeting of biomedical researchers of Asian descent in the Houston area led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). The MD Anderson Cancer Center is the first publicly known instance where NIH's inquiries have led an institution to invoke proceedings against researchers who allegedly have violated the rules.
On Jun 19, 2019, Bloomberg Business published an investigative report titled “The U.S. is purging Chinese scientists in a new Red Scare.” It identified the NIH and FBI for targeting ethnic Chinese scientists, including U.S. citizens, searching for a cancer cure. It provided the first account of what happened to Dr. Xifeng Wu 吴息凤.
MD Anderson Cancer Center
On April 19, 2019, Science reported that NIH inquiries about the foreign ties of specific NIH-funded researchers prompted at least 55 institutions to launch investigations. Five researchers at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, part of the University of Texas system, were the first publicly known instances where NIH’s inquiries led an institution to invoke termination proceedings.
Three senior researchers were ousted; one was under investigation; and one did not warrant termination. All were Chinese.
MD Anderson had been working with the FBI for several years on undisclosed national security investigations, which included searches of faculty email accounts and in one instance, video surveillance.
MD Anderson's actions, as well as the larger NIH and FBI efforts, added to concerns in the Chinese American science community that U.S. officials were targeting researchers for special scrutiny based on their ethnicity. On December 11, 2017, FBI received the cancer center's permission to obtain information from as many as 23 employee email accounts.
The revelations fueled complaints that MD Anderson was targeting its Chinese and Chinese American scientists for special scrutiny and removal. Some of the center's critics counted 10 senior MD Anderson researchers or administrators of Chinese descent who had retired, resigned, or been placed on administrative leave in 17 months. Some of these researchers reportedly left of their own accord, but their supporters said that a toxic climate and the perception of racial profiling hastened their departure.
Mien-Chie Hung, a researcher born in Taiwan left MD Anderson echoed that view of a brain drain as scientists left under a cloud of suspicion. Hung retired from his position as the cancer center's vice president for basic research to take a job as president of China Medical University in Taichung, Taiwan. He co-authored a letter to Science raising concerns about possible racial profiling at institutions across the country, expressing hope that "increased security measures will not be used to tarnish law-abiding scientists."
Some researchers worried the campaign to root out foreign influence at MD Anderson would be counterproductive and prompted some researchers to leave the United States. "These are the top talents that foreign countries have been trying to recruit unsuccessfully," says Steven Pei, an engineering professor in Houston and a former chairman of the board of United Chinese Americans.
By November 4, 2019, The New York Times reported 71 institutions, including many of the most prestigious medical schools in the United States, were investigating 180 individual cases involving potential theft of intellectual property. The cases began after the NIH, prompted by information provided by the FBI, sent 18,000 letters in 2018 urging administrators who oversee government grants to be vigilant.
Purge of Chinese Cancer Researchers
On June 13, 2019, Bloomberg Business published an investigative report titled “The U.S. is purging Chinese scientists in a new Red Scare.”
It provided a first account of what happened to Dr. Xifeng Wu, an award-winning epidemiologist and naturalized American citizen. She quietly stepped down as director of the Center for Public Health and Translational Genomics at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Wu resigned in January 2019 after facing several months of investigation and was branded as an oncological double agent in an increasingly globalized world of cancer research. Her resignation, and the recent departures of three other top Chinese American scientists from Houston-based MD Anderson, stem from the China Initiative.
Behind the investigation that led to Wu’s exit—and other such probes across the country—was the NIH, in coordination with the FBI.
According to the Bloomberg Business report, the NIH, the world’s biggest public funder of basic biomedical research, wields immense power over the nation’s health-research community. It allocates about $26 billion a year in federal grants; roughly $6 billion of that goes to cancer research.
In June 2019, NIH officials told the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance that the agency had contacted 61 research institutions about suspected diversion of proprietary information by grant recipients and referred 16 cases, mainly involving undisclosed ties to foreign governments, for possible legal action. Ways of working that had long been encouraged by the NIH and many research institutions, particularly MD Anderson, are now quasi-criminalized, with FBI agents reading private emails, stopping Chinese scientists at airports, and visiting people’s homes to ask about their loyalty.
Wu had not been charged with stealing anyone’s ideas, but in effect she stood accused of secretly aiding and abetting cancer research in China, an un-American activity in today’s political climate. She had spent 27 of her 56 years at MD Anderson. A month after resigning, she left her husband and two kids in the U.S. and took a job as dean of a school of public health in China.
In the early 2000s, MD Anderson forged “sister” relationships with five major cancer centers in China as part of an initiative to promote international collaborations. In 2015, China awarded MD Anderson its top honor for international scientific cooperation, in a ceremony attended by President Xi Jinping.
Wu’s work, like a lot of the academic research now in danger of being stifled, is not about developing patentable drugs. The mission is to reduce risk and save lives by discovering the causes of cancer. Prevention is not a product. It is not sellable. Or stealable.
“Historians will have to sort out whether Wu’s story and others like it marked a turning point when U.S. research institutions got serious about China’s avarice for American intellectual property, or a dangerous lurch down the path of paranoia and racial profiling. Or both. In any case, recent events in Houston and elsewhere indicate that Chinese people in America, including U.S. citizens, are now targeted for FBI surveillance,” the Bloomberg Business report said.
Congressional Probe
On February 20, 2020, The Hill reported that Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who chairs the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Chairwoman Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) sent letters to NIH and FBI demanding documents about the two agencies' investigations into whether Chinese Americans were working as spies on behalf of China.
While the two lawmakers acknowledged that there have been some confirmed cases of espionage, they questioned whether the focus on Chinese Americans amounted to racial profiling.
In their letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Reps. Raskin and Chu pointed to sample cases of Sherry Chen, Professor Xiaoxing Xi and Dr. Wei Su and requested specific information of the FBI investigations and prosecutions involving theft or attempted threat of intellectual property, monitoring of Chinese students and scholars, communications with NIH, college and university security efforts, and counterintelligence training materials, covering the period of January 1, 2014 to the present.
In their letter to NIH Director Francis Collins, Reps. Raskin and Chu requested specific information about mass mailings by NIH to 18,000 administrators, cases under NIH investigations and Office of Inspector General referrals, disclosure guidelines, and all communications with the FBI, covering the period of June 1, 2016 to the present.
NIH’s China Initiative
On March 23, 2023, over a year after the conclusion of the China Initiative, Science published an investigative report titled "Pall of Suspicion," revealing that the National Institutes of Health's "China initiative" has disrupted hundreds of lives and destroyed numerous academic careers.
For decades, Chinese-born U.S. faculty members were applauded for working with colleagues in China, and their universities cited the rich payoff from closer ties to the emerging scientific giant. But those institutions did an about-face after they began to receive emails in late 2018 from NIH.
The emails asked some 100 institutions to investigate allegations that one or more of their faculty had violated NIH policies designed to ensure federal funds were being spent properly. Most commonly, NIH claimed a researcher was using part of a grant to do work in China through an undisclosed affiliation with a Chinese institution. Four years later, 103 of those scientists—some 42% of the 246 targeted in the letters, most of them tenured faculty members—had lost their jobs.
In contrast to the very public criminal prosecutions of academic scientists under the China Initiative launched in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump to thwart Chinese espionage, NIH’s version has been conducted behind closed doors. Michael Lauer, head of NIH’s extramural research, says that secrecy is necessary to protect the privacy of individual scientists, who are not government employees. Universities consider the NIH-prompted investigations to be a personnel matter, and thus off-limits to queries from reporters. And the targeted scientists have been extremely reticent to talk about their ordeal.
Only one of the five scientists whose cases are described in this article has previously gone public with their story. And only one has pushed back successfully, winning a large settlement against her university for terminating her.
But a running tally kept by the agency shows the staggering human toll of NIH’s campaign. Besides the dismissals and forced retirements, more than one in five of the 246 scientists targeted were banned from applying for new NIH funding for as long as 4 years—a career-ending setback for most academic researchers. And almost two-thirds were removed from existing NIH grants.
NIH’s data also make clear who has been most affected. Some 81% of the scientists cited in the NIH letters identify as Asian, and 91% of the collaborations under scrutiny were with colleagues in China.
NIH is by far the largest funder of academic biomedical research in the United States, and some medical centers receive hundreds of millions of dollars annually from the agency. So when senior administrators heard Lauer [Michael Lauer, head of NIH’s extramural research] say a targeted scientist “was not welcome in the NIH ecosystem,” they understood immediately what he meant—and that he was expecting action.
“If NIH says there’s a conflict, then there’s a conflict, because NIH is always right,” says David Brenner, who was vice chancellor for health sciences at the University of California, San Diego, in November 2018 when the institution received a letter from Lauer asking it to investigate five medical school faculty members, all born in China. “We were told we have a problem and that it was up to us to fix it.”
In a panel discussion hosted by the University of Michigan in March 2024, Professor Ann Chih Lin, asserted that NIH made it clear that if they couldn’t resolve concerns regarding a faculty member and a grant, NIH would not only require universities to repay the grant, but also investigate universities’ entire portfolio of NIH grants. Fearing the loss of grant money, universities often approached the implicated professors and encouraged them to resign voluntarily or retire early. This strategy aimed to avoid a public disciplinary hearing or grievance process, which could bring unwanted attention to the case. Professors involved in such investigations typically refrained from discussing their cases to protect both themselves and the universities, often choosing to depart quietly.
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Headlined by “How Not to Cure Cancer – The U.S. is purging Chinese scientists in a New Red Scare,” investigative reports emerged on FBI and NIH nationwide activities targeting individuals of Asian descent, especially biomedical researchers in the Houston area.
3. Media Reports on Purge by NIH and FBI
