Charles M. Lieber. Credit: Kris Snibbe/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- A jury found Harvard University chemist Charles Lieber guilty of lying to the US government about taking research money from China.
- According to the tapes of Lieber’s interrogation, he participated in the Chinese programme to increase his chances of winning a Nobel Prize.
- There are indications that Lieber hid his involvement because he didn’t think it would matter, but his case offers a lesson about the fake science-politics divide.
There is a phenomenon in high-energy particle physics that I have found instructive as a metaphor to explain some things whose inner character may not be apparent to us but whose true nature is exposed in extreme situations. For example, consider the case of Charles Lieber, an American chemist whom a jury found guilty earlier today of lying to the US government about participating in a Chinese science programme and about having a Chinese bank account.
Through our everyday interactions with protons and neutrons – sitting in the nuclei of their respective atoms – we would have no reason to believe that they are made up of smaller particles. But when you probe a proton with another particle at an extremely high energy, such a probe can reveal that the proton is really made of smaller particles called quarks. (This is what the Large Hadron Collider in Europe does.)
Similarly, Lieber’s case is an extreme instance of a national government clashing with the nation’s scientific enterprise for engaging in a science-related activity with immutable political implications. In our everyday interactions, there is no reason to believe that the government, or any other relatively more powerful political entity, could have a problem with what some scientist is working on or has to say. But sparks start to fly the moment the scientist’s work, words or even thoughts begin to have political implications.
It is not like the protons are not made of quarks when probed at lower energies; it is that the latter don’t reveal themselves. Similarly, it is not like science is an apolitical activity even when it lacks political implications; it is that the relationship between science and politics, in that limited context, is too feeble to matter. But it is there.
According to a New York Times article explaining Lieber’s case, by Ellen Barry, the Trump-era ‘China Initiative’ to “root out scientists suspected of sharing sensitive information with China” has been accused of “prosecutorial overreach”, but also that Lieber also shot himself in the foot by denying his involvement in the Chinese programme when “he was specifically asked about his participation”.
Barry’s article makes the point that scientists are scared because the US government criminalised otherwise innocuous activities – activities that scientists have spent decades learning to not fear. At the same time, it would be unfair to spare Lieber, an accomplished nanoscience expert employed at Harvard University, the expectation to know what the consequences of his actions might be and the risk of ignoring them.
Perhaps he harboured a sense of exceptionalism vis-à-vis his cause; perhaps he thought the ‘China Initiative’ that had knocked on the doors of other scientists wouldn’t knock on his. But any which way, more than just being “about scaring the scientific community”, as one of Lieber’s former students says in the article, the initiative’s victory in the Charles Lieber case should also remind scientists that the best way to beat the initiative is for the scientific community to proactively engage in political issues.
Lieber’s excuse, according to tapes of his interrogation by Federal Bureau of Investigation officers, was that he wished to train younger scientists in a technology he had developed and thus increase his chances of winning a Nobel Prize. This is the science-politics link coming back to bite Lieber, and others like him (notably Brian Keating, whose act of ‘coming clean’ on this sentiment I continue to find admirable), who risk ruining their careers just win the prize.
One major impediment to acknowledging that politics is suffused in every human enterprise – including science – that happens in any organised society whose people govern themselves is that people often misunderstand politics to be “what their politicians say/do” instead of “the practice of self-governance”. But by understanding it to be the former, there is a hoopla every time some political leader or other apparently oversteps their ‘remit’.