More than 100 U.S biomedical scientists whose collaborations with China were once encouraged have lost their jobs

Pall of suspicion: NIH’s secretive ‘China initiative’ has destroyed scores of academic careers

More than 100 U.S biomedical scientists whose collaborations with China were once encouraged have lost their jobs

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 the U.S. National Institutes of Health (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.

In only 14 of the 246 cases—a scant 6%—did the institution fail to find any evidence to back up NIH’s suspicions. Lauer, who oversees NIH’s $30 billion grants portfolio, regards that high success rate as proof NIH only contacted institutions when there were compelling reasons to believe the targeted scientists were guilty of “scientific, budgetary, or commitment overlap” with NIH-funded projects.

“The fact that more than 60% of these cases have resulted in an employment separation, or a university taking the step of excluding a scientist from [seeking an NIH grant] for a significant period of time, means that something really, really serious has occurred,” Lauer told Science.