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发帖数: 3509 | 1 NIH Investigating Researchers Who May Have Failed to Disclose Foreign
Government Contributions
Multiple institutions may have such conflicts
By Lev Facher, STAT on August 23, 2018
NIH Investigating Researchers Who May Have Failed to Disclose Foreign
Government Contributions
The National Institutes of Health is investigating roughly a half-dozen
research institutions based on suspicions that researchers with federal
grants failed to disclose significant financial contributions from foreign
governments, Director Francis Collins said Thursday.
The fact-finding operation, Collins said, will center in many cases on
technology research.
“We are concerned about circumstances where people have intentionally been
deceptive about those connections, with an intention to divert intellectual
property or perhaps use their access to peer-review materials to ship them
overseas,” Collins told reporters after a Senate hearing.
On Wednesday, Collins also wrote to roughly 10,000 NIH grant institutions
encouraging them to set up briefings with FBI field offices about threats to
intellectual property and foreign interference. The topic has been a focus
for the FBI, Collins said, and the briefings would serve as an opportunity
for select grant recipients—whose grants come with a level of security
clearance—to hear about efforts to protect classified scientific
information.
Separately, the NIH established a panel to improve research security and
enforce rules that require researchers to disclose foreign financial
contributions.
The topic of foreign interests influencing American research was top of mind
across Capitol Hill on Thursday, as senators used an oversight hearing to
press Collins for more information. Across the hallway, Kelvin Droegemeier,
President Trump’s nominee to be White House science adviser, said China has
a history of stealing American research advances.
“At the same time, as we welcome foreign researchers into the U.S.,”
Droegemeier said, “I think historically they’ve been an important and very
robust part of our enterprise—we have to do that with care.”
In the letter to grant institutions, Collins wrote: “NIH is aware that some
foreign entities have mounted systematic programs to influence NIH
researchers and peer reviewers and to take advantage of the long tradition
of trust, fairness, and excellence of NIH-supported research activities.”
Collins requested information from NIH-funded institutions about three areas
of concern. The first: whether their researchers failed to disclose
contributions from other organizations, including foreign governments, which
Collins said “threatens to distort” research outcomes.
The second: whether researchers at the institutions diverted intellectual
property, as has been alleged recently at Duke University. A researcher who
worked at a Duke lab in 2007—who has since become a famous Chinese inventor
—is accused of having worked on behalf of the Chinese government to steal
intellectual property.
Though the Duke researcher was not funded by an NIH grant, the case has
generated attention throughout the scientific community and spurred debate
about how careful American research institutions should be in their work
with foreign researchers.
Lastly, Collins expressed concern that some grant application reviewers
might have failed to keep information in grant proposals confidential,
including to foreign entities. He’s worried, he told senators, about those
disclosures “or other attempts to influence funding decisions.”
At the hearing Thursday, committee chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.)
took care to emphasize that in almost every case, he supported the presence
of talented foreign researchers in the U.S. and hoped the NIH would continue
to fund them.
“We must move effectively to root out examples where the system is being
exploited but make sure to preserve the vibrancy of the diverse workforce
playing a major role in the American biomedical research success story,”
Collins said.
Separately, the Senate on Thursday continued its consideration of a spending
bill that would provide $39.1 billion in NIH funding in 2019, which would
mark the fourth consecutive year in which the agency’s budget increased by
roughly $2 billion. | b********n
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