Bloomberg Scores FBI, NIH for Witch Hunt against Chinese Scientists

June 17, 2019 (EIRNS)—Bloomberg on June 14 published a long, highly critical report on the large-scale assault by the FBI and National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Chinese and Chinese-American scientists in the U.S., written by Bloomberg’s Peter Waldman. Titled, “The NIH and the FBI Are Targeting Ethnic Chinese Scientists, Including U.S. Citizens, Searching for a Cancer Cure,” it features the case of Wu Xifeng, “an award-winning epidemiologist and naturalized American citizen, [who] quietly stepped down as director of the Center for Public Health and Translational Genomics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center after a three-month investigation into her professional ties in China.”

Waldman points to the anti-science nature of this assault as well as the obviously racist attack on China and the Chinese. He writes:

“In recent decades, cancer research has become increasingly globalized, with scientists around the world pooling data and ideas to jointly study a disease that kills almost 10 million people a year. International collaborations are an intrinsic part of the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Moonshot program, the government’s $1 billion blitz to double the pace of treatment discoveries by 2022. One of the programs tag lines: ‘Cancer knows no borders.’ Except, it turns out, the borders around China.”

On Wu’s case, he notes that she

“has 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’d 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 position as dean of a school of public health in Shanghai.”

She has filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Waldman states the obvious truth: “Recent events in Houston and elsewhere indicate that Chinese people in America, including U.S. citizens, are now targeted for FBI surveillance.”

Wu, Waldman writes, “was a model collaborator. She attended Chinese medical conferences, hosted visiting Chinese professors in Houston, and published 87 research papers with co-authors from 26 Chinese institutions.” Ironically, the NIH itself has, since 2010, given about $5 million every year in special grants for U.S.-China collaborations, with 20% going to cancer research, and a counterpart in China has pitched in an additional $3 million a year, resulting in significant “high-impact papers on cancer.”

Waldman continues: “From 1997 to 2009, 17% of defendants indicted under the U.S. Economic Espionage Act had Chinese names. From 2009 to 2015, that rate tripled, to 52%, according to a December 2018 article in the Cardozo Law Review.” He characterizes the FBI McCarthyesque questions asked of ethnic Chinese scientists as: “Are you now or have you ever been more committed to curing cancer in China than in the U.S.?”

Waldman concludes: “The greatest fear is that history may repeat itself in this political climate, and Chinese Americans may be rounded up like Japanese Americans during World War II. The fear and worry is real.”