Ex-Harvard professor Charles Lieber avoids jail for lying about China work, gets house arrest and is fined
- The retired academic has an incurable form of cancer, making him a ‘sitting duck for disease’ if he’s incarcerated, his lawyer says
- Lieber had lied to US authorities about his role in China’s Thousand Talents Programme and his affiliation with a university in Wuhan
Former Harvard University chemist and department head Charles Lieber was sentenced on Wednesday to six months of house arrest for lying to US authorities about his role in the Thousand Talents Programme, one of a number of Chinese projects to recruit scientists and bolster research.
US District Judge Rya Zobel sentenced Lieber in Boston, where in December 2021 a jury convicted him in a case that stemmed from a former US Justice Department programme known as the China Initiative.
The initiative began in 2018 during president Donald Trump’s administration to counter suspected Chinese economic espionage and research theft, and it was criticised for impeding academic collaboration and fuelling anti-Asian bias. The US officially ended the programme in February 2021, one month into President Joe Biden’s administration, though some of the cases connected to it are still unresolved.
“I feel pretty strongly about the need to end the China Initiative, not just in name but also in fact,” said Jeremy Wu, founder of APA Justice, a civic group. “Lieber got what he asked for in terms of the sentencing, and that chapter of targeting and profiling people with access to China has to stop. It’s ruined so many lives and careers.”
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Lieber, 64, was an award-winning leader in the field of nanoscience, a field dealing with the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules that is a priority under Beijing’s Made in China 2025 development road map. He retired after three decades at Harvard and has been diagnosed with a form of blood cancer, which his lawyer said was incurable.
