A Harvard Professor and Wuhan

The Wuhan Institute of Virology (See here) has earned its badge of notoriety. Now a prominent Harvard professor is likely to draw attention to another Wuhan establishment, The Wuhan University of Technology (See here).

Professor Charles Lieber, a renowned authority on nanotechnology, had a decade-long academic partnership with that Wuhan Technical University. Today a federal court in Boston found Professor Lieber guilty of accepting payments from a Chinese government talent program, one designed to advance China to the top of the scientific world.

The professor was convicted of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars, these amounts paid in cash or in funds deposited into a Chinese bank account, monies that the professor apparently did not report on his income tax forms. There is more to the story, but those are the key elements.

The take home message? The connection between China and professor Lieber is another example of a foreign government dangling money to recruit world-renowned scientists for purposes, one might assume, not exactly focused on the good of all mankind.