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发帖数: 1 | 1 The China Initiative must end
H. HOLDEN THORP
In the fall of 2018, declaring “enough is enough,” then-Attorney General
Jeff Sessions launched the China Initiative which sought to address “new
and evolving threats to our economy, not only defense and intelligence
targets, but also universities and research institutions.” (1) The
government felt that there was significant evidence of economic espionage by
China against the US, and it must be addressed. Four years later, there is
scant evidence that the amount of illegal activity turned up was worth the
heartache and expense of running the initiative, and very little, if any
evidence, was found showing that actual trade secrets were transferred
prematurely to China. Enough really is enough—it is time to end this waste
of resources and attention.
US federally funded research efforts—and those of many other countries—
have always had an underlying nationalistic agenda—a point sometimes
forgotten by the recipients of federal funding. But ever since Vannevar Bush
argued for the creation of a federally funded scientific enterprise in 1945
, there has always been a nationalistic motivation presented to Congress
that success in science would lead to US economic, medical, and military
success. Initially, this approach to the scientific enterprise was used to
prevail over Germany and Japan. It was then used in relation to the former
Soviet Union, and now China. Each year at the congressional budget hearings,
representatives from federal science agencies and scientific societies
present the case for more science funding which to many researchers would be
considered shockingly nationalistic. In recent years, this involves talking
about the rise of Chinese science and how it is a threat to US economic and
military success.
What’s striking is the cognitive dissonance between this nationalistic
message and the way that science is actually conducted. Scientific progress
relies on collaboration, on recruiting the best possible talent to important
scientific problems, and on publicizing these findings to the entire world.
So setting up science as a competition with talented scientists in other
countries and as harboring secrets that are not to be shared widely flies in
the face of the core values of the scientific community. But year after
year, scientific leaders go to Congress and request increases in funding
using the rhetoric of nationalism, all while realizing that this approach is
in conflict with the values and expectations of bench scientists. Further,
when the yearly request for funding comes around, the agencies are always
willing to adopt policies that put administrative burden and blame on
individual institutions to better protect the overall enterprise. This
doctrine of doing what it takes to get the money is nothing new; it has
attended science policy for 75 years.
It is therefore no surprise that when the China Initiative was announced,
the National Institutes of Health dutifully began sending letters to
universities demanding they audit the China connections of prominent
researchers. Most, but not all, of these researchers were Chinese or of
Chinese descent, which has logically induced accusations that the China
Initiative was racially motivated. Further, these efforts sought to
determine whether researchers were receiving and disclosing funds from China
even though there was no clear evidence that the failure to disclose such
funding was an effective indicator of whether research knowhow was being
inappropriately transferred. Instead, the whole effort became an exercise in
determining whether correct forms were being filled out, something college
professors are notoriously bad at doing, especially in recent years when the
administrative burden of holding federal grants has escalated significantly.
The failure of the China Initiative to produce any results shows the serious
flaws in the reasoning behind it. The recent acquittal of Gang Chen, who
writes an editorial in Science this week about his experiences, shows how
much damage has been done to the scientific enterprise with so little—in
Chen’s case nothing—in return. So far, the initiative’s only significant
conviction occurred when Harvard chemist Charles Lieber failed to report as
income a bag of cash from his China activities and then didn’t explain it
accurately to the FBI. As I have written elsewhere, Lieber certainly
deserves to be convicted for these illegal acts, but even in this case,
there was no evidence that scientific secrets were inappropriately
transferred to China. Given Lieber’s robust record of scientific
publication, it is hard to imagine how he would have been harboring any such
secrets that he wasn’t planning to publicize widely.
There are actual incidents of scientific information being transferred to
China prior to publication in the US. The most famous case involves the
apparent theft of knowhow on metamaterials from David Smith’s laboratory at
Duke University. It is entirely appropriate for the US intelligence
apparatus to pursue cases such as this, but it is an immense overreaction to
send university administrators into a frenzy auditing the forms of their
productive faculty when they have so much work to do facilitating the
research itself. More importantly, this effort has a chilling effect both on
establishing legitimate and important collaborations with China, and even
more importantly, it sends exclusionary and discriminatory signals to
researchers of Chinese descent who are making such important contributions
to research in the US.
What should be done? The federal government needs to wind down the China
Initiative immediately and go back to managing the small number of
legitimate issues on an episodic basis. Yesterday, the Department of Justice
said they were retiring the name of the initiative but “broadening” the
effort and not winding down any of the 2,000 cases that are currently open;
that is unlikely to make much difference. The funding agencies need to stop
the practice of piling more administrative burden on researchers and
institutions every time Congress gets another erroneous idea about
scientific research; this is where enough truly is enough. The institutions
need to take a stronger stand against these efforts; MIT rightly stood by
Gang Chen but this has not been the norm with most of these cases. And
finally, researchers who accept federal grants need to understand that they
are participating in an effort steeped in a nationalistic agenda over the
last 75 years. Only by understanding the full context of how federal funding
is achieved can faculty members participate in the conversation about how
to improve both the quality of science and the humaneness and compassion of
the system. |
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