 Okay, so next on the agenda is a presentation from Dr. Mike Lauer, the director of the Office of Extramural Research, and I've asked Eric to do his introduction, please. And I'm delighted to do that. I'm just trying to get rid of one more window if I can. There we go. And is Mike on? He is. Sure. I see where he was in the Zoom window. Hi, Mike. Thanks for joining us. It's my pleasure to introduce a good friend and colleague of NHRI, Dr. Mike Lauer. I suspect many of you know exactly who Mike is, since you're all in the extramural research program. And let me just give you a little bit of background. Mike brings a distinguished and highly accomplished career both outside of NIH and more recently in NIH. He trained as a physician at Albany Medical College, further clinical training at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, got involved in the Framingham Heart Study early on in his career. But then he spent 14 years at Cleveland Clinic as professor of medicine, epidemiology, and biostatistics, where he was a highly accomplished clinical researcher. Hart London Blood Institute was fortunate to recruit Mike to NIH back in 2007. And from 2007 to 2015, he served as the division director at the National Hart London Blood Institute. But then Mike was appointed the NIH deputy director for extramural research, where he has just done a fantastic job leading that important office of extramural research and the office of the director. Many of you are familiar with his open mic blog and various other ways that he communicates. I would just say at a personal level, I've known Mike for many years, dating back when he was at Hart London Blood as many other senior members of NHGRI staff. And he's just a great friend, great colleague. One of these people who's always approached incredibly collegial. And since taking over the office of extramural research, I think he's done a spectacular job and continues to be incredibly interactive and helpful just constantly. What Council wanted to hear from him about is in the category of duties otherwise assigned. Because of his role in overseeing extramural research at NIH, he was called into a number of very complicated circumstances related to foreign interference and has therefore become the point person in many ways at NIH for a large set of very complicated issues that has taken up an immense amount of his time on top of all of his other responsibilities. But it's great that he can spend a little bit of time with us to inform Council and people watching remotely in our open session. This is a very important topic. And Mike has been an incredibly effective NIH leader in helping NIH navigate through these issues, both dealing with acute issues and how to prepare us for dealing with such issues going forward. So with that, Mike, I'll turn it over to you and thanks so much for joining us. Right, Eric. Thank you very much and really appreciate that very kind introduction. I can go to the next slide. So it gives me an enormous pleasure to be here today and to give this opportunity to tell you a little bit about some of the work that we've been doing. And I like Eric's description of this as duties, other duties as assigned, because that seems to be exactly what this is. I'm sure you've seen some of these headlines. The one on the left, Florida Center referring to the Moffitt Cancer Center, details fired, scientists linked to China. In this particular case, the CEO of Moffitt had a contract with the Thousand Talents Program in China and there were a number of other scientists involved as well. In the upper right-hand corner, the University of Florida swiftly addressed foreign research controversy. They had a number of professors there, including one who was a vice president of a Chinese university, unbeknownst to everybody. Going on down, this made a lot of news. The chair of the Department of Chemistry at Harvard, Charles Lieber, was arrested for lying to the Defense Department and the NIH and more recently has been indicted for filing false tax returns because of failure to report Chinese income. And then on the lower right-hand corner, Emory Professor had a criminal charge linked to Chinese government program. I'm going to talk about that one in a little bit more detail since that did get quite a bit of attention. Going to the next slide, these headlines and what I'm about to talk about fall into three major buckets. One is undisclosed research support and that includes undisclosed employment, including Thousand Talents contracts, as well as undisclosed grants from foreign agencies. In some cases, the NIH is effectively funding the exact same work that other granting agencies are supporting. The second is perhaps one that's a bit easier to understand and that's undisclosed conflict of interest. And then the third are peer review violations. So let's go to the next slide and we're going to start by talking about what we have referred to as shadow laboratories. This is manifestations of undisclosed Chinese employment and grant research support. Next slide. In January of 2018, in the career guide section of nature, this article appeared. What is China's Thousand Talents plan? The nation's bid to lure back expat scientists and recruit highly skilled foreign researchers is now in its 10th year. This was a highly complimentary article and it suggested that for some scientists, this may be a way to obtain research support. But this is not an ordinary research support program. It's a recruitment program and that's pointed out here in the headline. If we go to the next slide, these are quotes that are taken straight from the Nature article. To apply, you must already have a firm job offer from a Chinese institution. All applicants must have worked at renowned universities outside China and all applications to the Thousand Talents scheme go through the Chinese university employer. This is a very important point. People, scientists who are employed by American institutions who are trying to get support from the Thousand Talents scheme are not applying through their American institutions. They're applying to their Chinese university employer whom their American institutions often know little or nothing about. We're going to show you some examples of that in just a bit. Next slide. So the key problem here is non-disclosure. In late 2018 and then again in early 19, the Hoover Institution issued this report called China's Influence in American Interest Promoting Constructive Vigilance. They point out that China's most systematic channel for identifying foreign-based non-traditional collectors is the Thousand Talents program. Non-traditional collectors is an interesting term and I'm going to talk about that also in a bit. This is a recruitment program. Now it was stated at that time that official websites list more than 300 U.S. government researchers and more than 600 U.S. corporate personnel who have accepted Thousand Talents program money. In many cases, these individuals do not disclose the Thousand Talents program money to their employer which for U.S. government employees is illegal and for corporate personnel likely represents a conflict of interest that violates their employment employment. And in fact now what we have seen is that this is also an important problem within biomedical academia. Next slide. Let me take one last background step before we get into the depth here and bring up what is hopefully what you'll see is an obvious question which is what is a recruitment? The Thousand Talents program and the hundreds of other related programs in China are recruitment programs. So here is a highly oversimplified model of the world. There is an American university on the left and a Chinese university on the right. Each university has an academic leader and one scientist. Okay if you click now let's say that this Chinese academic leader sees this American scientist and would like to recruit the American scientist to China offers a package and is successful in doing that click. And now this scientist is moved over to the Chinese university. This is a standard recruitment. There's this kind of thing happens all the time and of note and this again may seem perfectly obvious the American academic leader in the upper left hand corner knows what has happened. This leader knows that there is one less scientist working at their university and therefore one thing they're not going to do is submit an application to NIH identifying that scientist as a principal investigator. Hopefully all that is completely obvious. Next slide. So now I'm going to show you how a Thousand Talents program recruitment works. So the first thing that happens is that a person will submit an application they may be nominated to. The applications and we've now seen quite a few of them the applications look like grant applications. They go on for many pages. There's a description of scientific background. There's a description of the candidate and then let's say that that the application goes to review and looks like it's going to be successful. So then what will happen is the person will get a document that looks like this. It says thousand you can think of this as a just in time notification. National Thousand Talents program short listing notification. This is an actual short listing notification that was sent to a well funded scientist working in a prestigious American university. It says to this person after the experts review an approval of the working group on the transfer of high level foreign talents you are officially shortlisted in the National Thousand Talents program. According to the related provisions you would enjoy the corresponding working and living benefits and receive a certain amount of financial support after you have performed the work contract. Notices hereby given. One important point about this document is the heading. The heading is the organization department of the central committee of the Communist Party of China. The talents programs are political programs. They're run out of a political organization in this case the Communist Party of China. And in fact we've seen recently application guides which point out that the political stance of the candidate is an extremely important part of their of the likelihood that they're going to get supported by the program. Okay so that's the first part here is to note that this is a political document. The second is the question. Is there a distinction in China between the Communist Party and the government? Yes so that's a great question. Now this is not my immediate area of expertise but I would point out that prior to the Thousand Talents program there was something called the Hundred Talents program. The Hundred Talents program was run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences which is a government program. It was felt that that program was not being successful. They were not recruiting the numbers of scientists that they were hoping for and so the Thousand Talents program was an attempt by the political apparatus to take this over because they thought they could do a better job. That's a very good question. Okay next slide. All right so this is an example of what a contract looks like. The other point I wanted to make from the previous slide is that there is a mention of a work contract. So these Thousand Talents awards involve a contract. It's a hybrid between an employment contract and a research grant. We have now seen dozens of these contracts and this is just an example of one. This one actually happens to come from the Chinese Academy of Sciences but we've seen contracts from various universities. There is a party A and a party B. Party A is the employer in this case the Chinese Academy of Sciences and party B is the NIH funded researcher. These contracts go on for many pages. In this case one key point here is the position and term of employment. It says party A is party B as a professor in the Thousand Talents program for a period of five years. The employment period is from 2014 to 2019. Party B shall work full time at party A premise as a professor effective for the commencement date of this contract. Now in this particular case and we've seen other cases like this this person was working full time at an American institution and that American institution was representing this person as a full-time employee to NIH. That American institution had no idea that this person had signed a full-time contract with a university or with an entity in China. Okay there's another part of this contract that's interesting. Job objectives during the employment period the laboratory in the United States will be gradually moved back to China to rebuild. The idea here is to effectively reproduce the lab that exists in the United States and move it to China again without the knowledge of the American institution. Okay next slide. This was a report from the Department of Justice regarding a postdoc by the name of Shin Wang who was arrested at LAX while he was planning to leave to China. He had a postdoc position at UCSF and the reason why I'm showing you this is because within the documents if you click there is a statement that this person had linkages to the PLA. So he was a biomedical researcher but he had linkages to the People's Liberation Army. He had a position of major within the army and the director his supervisor within the PLA had told him to observe the layout of the UCSF lab and bring back information on how to replicate it to China. So this is just another example of one of the key purposes of this operation is to move basically transfer the knowledge to know how the methodology and in some cases we've actually are aware of cases where it's down to the wing nut that that kind of information gets transferred from the United States to China without the knowledge of the American institution. Next. Okay now the contracts also include provisions as well as expected deliverables. So here's an example this is from a different contract. Party A shall provide party C in this case party C is a different American researcher very well funded by NIH. So in this case this person gets a basic startup research fund with an accumulative amount of eight million RMB which is about one point two million dollars. This is a research fund provided to this person again without the knowledge of the American institution without the knowledge of the NIH. There are expected deliverables in response to this and if you look on the bottom here it says within three years of project implementation this scientist is expected to deliver two to three patents domestic patents and by domestic patents that means Chinese patents. We've actually seen now a number of cases where Chinese patents are being are being issued by American inventors who are putting on their Chinese patents materials that clearly come from NIH funded work. Okay next slide. All right so as a reminder this is what a clean recruitment looks like. The person has relocated to the Chinese university the American academic leader knows exactly what's going on but if you click in a thousand and click again in a thousand talents recruitment what has happened is that the person has an appointment in China but they maintain their appointment in the United States and the American university either knows nothing about what's going on or they know something they may know that their employee has a part-time position in China but they don't really understand exactly what it means they may think that their employee is giving lectures or doing seminars but they don't understand that their employee actually has a laboratory so in other words their understanding is incomplete. So if we move to the next slide this is an example of how the American institutions are completely unaware of what's going on. This is an email that was sent from a institutional president to one of his faculty members and it reads like this. Dear Dr. X we were unaware of these additional funding sources until the communication from Dr. Lauer at NIH. We have obtained translations of these applications and contracts regarding the thousand talents program you indicated that this was an honor program comparable to an academic title. It is clear from the contract that this program includes provision of space staff and funds for laboratory research and expected research deliverables. Now it should be clear but in this case the American academic leader the university president had seen the contracts and the scientists did not know that their university leader had seen a contract so I want to point out a couple things here one is as I mentioned before the American academic institution is unaware of what's going on the second is that there are there's a lie the the scientists told a lie about what the thousand talents program actually is not knowing that his university leadership knew the truth about what was going on and we have seen lots of lies I'll give you some examples of some of the other lies that we've seen before but some of the lies that we've seen like this one are rather remarkable. And I ask something do you does NIH consider lies by omission to be lies as well? Well there are obligations to disclose all financial support and in a way it's not really a lie by omission because when when the application gets submitted it has to be there's an attestation that the application is complete and accurate so if there's a knowledge that the application is not complete then that's an ineffectively an active commission by omission. It's a good question. No good answer thanks. Okay next slide. All right now here's another example of the US institution not being aware of what's going on this is taken from the criminal complaint against Xiao Jiang Li this was the scientist at Emory University a lot of press about this. This is from the criminal complaint. Dr. Li certified that his effort at Emory was 100% and he certified this numerous times 75% of his time working on grants 25% of his time doing teaching and various other things. In fact he was spending 60% of his time in China. He had paid positions at the Chinese Academy of Sciences he also had a paid position at Jianan University and during all this time he was being supported as an FTE at Emory and NIH was paying Emory thinking that he was working 100% of time at Emory and in fact that wasn't the case so this is again another example of where the American institution is not aware of what their employee is doing. Okay next slide. So we have seen now dozens of these foreign employment agreements they're not all thousand talents programs they're there are hundreds of these programs but these are some common themes there's a time commitment it can be a month it can be two months it can be full time there's substantial funding for research and we've seen some of these contracts that includes millions of dollars of support I think the largest one we've seen so far was a five million dollar startup fund they get a laboratory for free they get equipment they get personnel which they don't have to pay for they also get paid a salary you may have heard that Charles Lieber was alleged to have received the salary of fifty thousand dollars a month most of the salaries are less than that but nonetheless they are substantial there's a housing benefit which is typically 75 to 150 thousand dollars a year so they don't have to pay for their housing in China in return for this they are expected to produce deliverables these include papers we've seen contracts that will say you will have at least one paper in science nature or cell or you will have five papers or 10 papers that appear in journals that have an impact factor of 10 or higher these are some of the some of the some of the language we've seen sometimes there are patents I showed you an example of that from a previous contract we've also seen a few contracts that stipulate training requirements including training in the United States so that the contract will say you will bring to your lab in the United States people from our university who are part of the youth thousand talents programs and they will be trained in your American lab and then come back to China now obviously this creates conflicts of commitment or conflicts of interest the most obvious kind of conflict of commitment is if you have a full-time job in China you can't have a full-time job in the United States at the same time because 12 plus 12 is greater than 12 okay next slide all right now the money is an interesting part of this and this became quite prominent it became prominent the Charles Lieber case but this is another example this is the program at Moffitt where or the event at Moffitt where it was discovered that six people including the CEO had signed contracts with the thousand talents program and if you click again the internal investigation which was then submitted to the Florida legislature indicated that top leaders and researchers at the cancer center had opened personal bank accounts in China and had received unreported personal payments and other research support so we see different kinds of money there is money like I've shown you before specifically for research you're given you're given a research fund that research fund goes to the university in China and that research fund is then used to build up a research program then there's also personal money personal money could be in the form of salary travel housing and it's interesting we've seen these exchanges where there's discussion about how the personal money shall be handled some of it shall be transferred in cash some of it shall be put into bank accounts in China by the way the bank accounts are always in China they never transfer money directly here to the United States okay next so the Emory case is an example of where the money became quite relevant this is what eventually he pleaded guilty to was he filed false tax returns Dr. Lee made $500,000 in personal compensation while he was in China this $500,000 was not reported to Emory it was not reported to the NIH and it was not reported to the IRS and there may be now a number of other cases in which this is how the government is going to pursue the the problematic behavior okay next slide all right so I've talked about the the contracts when you get a job at a Chinese university just like in an American university one of your opportunities and perhaps expectations is to apply for grant support so you can apply for grant support to any of the number of Chinese granting agencies and here we are actually talking about a government organization so as an example the National Natural Science Foundation of China this is a funding agency this is an example of an application that was filled out by an American researcher very well funded American researcher these applications look very much like an NIH or NSF application they go on for many pages they include forms they include scientific material they include the equivalent of biosketches and if we go to the next slide one of the frequent well we see this in virtual realities is a table of the project team so here's an example of a table and in this case line one it was an American scientist again extremely well funded American scientist who functioned as the PI and in the right column he indicates that he is going to spend 10 person months a year working on this grant now this person had committed himself to something like six or seven months of support on NIH grant so that this obviously is a problem and we have seen quite a few cases like this where there's clear over commitment next slide another problem are duplicate grants so this is a simplistic view of this but where the American grant and the Chinese grant are highly similar overlapping or in some cases just plain downright identical we had one case where a translator essentially said I'm going to stop translating here because you have the translation it was the grant that was submitted to NIH by the way we have seen both both patterns we have seen cases where a grant is funded by the NIH it is then translated into Chinese and submitted to the National Science Foundation of China for their support we have seen cases where the grant is funded by the National Science Foundation of China and then translated into English and submitted to us for our support we've also seen cases where people will submit their RPPR their American NIH progress report and they'll translate the Chinese and submit it to to the Chinese granting agency for their Chinese progress report so we have found ourselves funding grants that are identical to or highly similar to Chinese grants so investigators are double dipping and not disclosing at this point we have already received I believe millions of dollars we're certainly well over a million dollars but I think we're now into the multiple millions of dollars of reimbursements from American universities because we were funding duplicate grants needless to say unbeknownst to the institution all right now there are um civil implications um and actually this gets back to your earlier question uh failure to disclose is a problem last December the U.S. Department of Justice this was one of our earlier cases reached a 5.5 million dollar false claim settlement with the Van Andel Research Institute in Grand Rapids Michigan because of two scientists who failed to disclose substantial grant support that they were receiving from from China so this is an example of a civil implication where one of our referrals led to a civil settlement okay next and then there are also criminal implications this is a case that was announced a few months ago it involved a scientist at Cleveland Clinic or former scientist at Cleveland Clinic who was a thousand talents participant he also had received extensive grant support from China for overlapping work so a criminal complaint was filed here and then if you go to the next slide this is another case this was just announced a couple of months ago of a scientist who was at Ohio State University he was the Department of Justice alleges was involved in a scheme to use 4.1 million dollars of grant money from China from NIH to develop Chinese expertise in rheumatology and immunology he knew that he was being investigated and so he boarded a plane to go to China he was met by agents in Anchorage, Alaska and then brought back to Columbus this is a case that that is still pending okay next slide all right so I've talked about the undisclosed employment the undisclosed contracts and the undisclosed grants the next item to talk about are undisclosed financial conflicts of interest and in a way this one may be a bit easier to understand so if we go to the next slide this is a report that was issued in 2017 it was written primarily in Mandarin of the Kanju Kangui biological pharmaceutical technology company and if you look at the logo you can guess what this company is focused on it's focused on genetic diseases of the eye now Kang Rui stands for Kang Zhang he's the husband and Rui is his wife and the two of them who were based in San Diego set up this company to develop technologies for genetic eye research they did not disclose this company the company at that time was worth about not quite 12 million dollars Kang Zhang had 49% equity in the company and his wife Rui Hao had 27% equity so between the two of them they they basically owned this company and if you go to the next slide this is an example of a paper that they published and there were multiple other papers that look quite similar so Rui who is one of the is one of the authors she identifies one affiliation and that's the Kang Rui biological pharmaceutical technology company in Gangzhou the senior author is Kang Zhang he identifies a number of affiliations which included UCSD his primary affiliation was a Sichuan university in Chengdu China he did not include the company as one of his affiliations even though he had 49% equity in it and under author information it says the authors declare no competing financial interests this was pattern was repeated in multiple other papers that these two published they did not disclose their their Chinese conflicts to UCSD or to the NIH by the way there were multiple other problems with Kang Zhang as well he resigned his position in July of 2019 okay next the third kind of problem that we've seen are peer review breaches and perhaps the best known is next one next slide so this was reported first in the cancer letter and then it appeared on the front page of the New York Times in November of 2019 this was an MD Anderson researcher very well funded by NIH who was serving on the study section as a member of the study section he had access of course to dozens of applications he then sent these applications to China he emailed them and he would say things like this is here's the bone and meat that you need keep it to yourself some methods you may learn from this proposal but keep it confidential so this person was essentially emailing confidential grant applications to colleagues in China needless to say this is a violation of NIH rules and you know to us represents an extremely egregious kind of behavior next slide all right so i've talked about the three major problems i've talked about the undisclosed research support in the form of contracts and grants i've talked about undisclosed conflicts of interest and i've talked about the peer review let me end by sharing some other observations at this point we have reached out to over 90 institutions about 196 scientists of concern by the way the number today i think is actually higher than that i would point out that not all the scientists are ethnically Chinese most of them are not surprising given that the talents programs are targeting expats but some of the the best known cases right now such as Charles Lieber and Alan List are people who are not ethnically Chinese one thing that is interesting is that while nearly all fields of biomedicine appear to be represented nearly all are involved in some kind of preclinical research this is consistent with what we've heard from other parts of government defense energy computer science physics and that is that much of the focus seems to be on basic science or pre-applied science and so what we're seeing is consistent with that i mentioned to you that we have we have encountered a number of lies and these are some of the other lies that we have seen some of these lies we've actually seen now more than once like it is true that i'm named as a pi on a chinese grant but i never wrote the grant i never saw the grant i allowed somebody else to use my name as the pi on the grant because i'm famous and i thought that that would enable the grant to get funded another is i knew nothing about this grant despite the fact that the grant was found on their email and and they cited the grant as a source of support in their senior author publications another is i didn't actually do the work in other words yes it's true i had the contract yes it's true i was a pi on a chinese grant but i never did the work and therefore there's nothing for you to worry about and then another is the affiliations and published papers were an error so we see that they will cite their chinese institution often as their primary affiliation and yet they'll and they'll do this many many many times and then they'll say oh that i'm sorry that was a mistake i didn't mean to say that i was affiliated with seachuan university that that was a mistake on my part next these are some data that we presented to the acd the advisory committee to the director back in june so these are data as of last june these numbers literally change every day but just to give you a sense of where we are so at that point we had reached out on 189 scientists and we had determined that 70 of them had an undisclosed foreign grant over 50 of them had an undisclosed talents award and then not quite 10 had an undisclosed foreign company there were fewer with the peer review violations over 80 there was some serious NIH violation interestingly enough a number of institutions volunteered to us even though they didn't have to that that their employees had violated institutional rules many universities have rules that say you cannot apply to get research support through another institution without pre-approval by us first and so just by applying for our research support from a chinese granting agency through a foreign institution that would represent a violation of an institutional rule at that point 54 scientists had been terminated or resigned as a consequence of inquiries and that number is higher now it's well over 60 and there were additional groups of scientists who may not have been terminated or resigned from their institution but the institutions recognized that the NIH violations were so serious that they were removing this their scientists from the NIH ecosystem for for a period of time okay next there's been a lot of interest and activity on the left is a report it was this is a bipartisan report issued by the permanent subcommittee of investigations from the senate committee on homeland security and governmental affairs threats to the u.s research enterprise china's talent recruitment plans this report is quite good i had the opportunity to testify before the u.s senate last november about this in the middle is a interesting and thoughtful report that was commissioned by the national science foundation to the jason group the jason group is a group of scientists who have high-level security clearance this is an unusual jason report in that it was unclassified they talked about the balance between fundamental research security and open science and collaboration at the same time and then on the right is a dear colleagues letter that was sent by kelvin droga mayer who's the director of ostp next slide the universities have taken this quite seriously and we've been quite pleased by this this was released by a au and apou in may of 2020 they have collected and shared best practices they had already done this back in april of 2019 and this is an updated report and is quite detailed thorough and thoughtful next slide there are some new concerns that are coming up what is about the military so on the left this is a report about a scientist who did not disclose her military affiliation she was working as a biomedical researcher at one of the university of california campuses and she was arrested for falsifying her visa application we we are aware now also through a recent hoover report that nih and nsf may have inadvertently funded our research at chinese military institutions without you know without our knowledge and without the knowledge of the american institution this is a new area of concern for us and we'll see where that goes on the right is a a report by the australian strategic policy institute is a non-partisan think tank in australia the australian government is ahead of us they have been quite seriously affected by chinese efforts to steal intellectual property so this points out that the that the chinese government the chinese communist party has set up recruitment stations all around the world there may be over a hundred recruitment stations here in the united states to recruit people into the talents programs and we have encountered some of them where it turns out that the scientists that we are concerned about is not only a member of the thousand talents program and receiving undisclosed support from the thousand talents program but is actively recruiting scientists from their own institution or from other institutions to join the talents programs as well okay next next slide the this is a trans government effort the white house office of science and technology policy recently released this slide deck on the security integrity of america's research enterprise we would be very happy to share this with you NIH contributed a lot to this there is a group there called j core the joint committee on research environment and there's a subcommittee on science and security which i'm a co-chair of we are we've been working very closely with them but the idea of this is that this is a trans government concern it's not just an NIH concern the FBI has launched a campaign on what it's called a national counterintelligence task force i'm one of the group leaders of that and again this is part of a trans government effort to deal with these problems next slide um now i haven't said anything about collaboration and the reason is is because everything i've talked about has nothing to do with collaboration offshore bank accounts secret cash payments undisclosed employment agreements undisclosed grants undisclosed patents none of those stealing NIH applications undisclosed conflicts of interest none of these represent collaborations this is from a website that penn state university is put up which we think is really quite good and this language i think is absolutely spot on so international collaborations are acceptable and in fact encourage but we urge researchers to err on the side of transparency it protects everyone's interest the federal government penn state individual researchers and their international collaborators to have international relationships disclosed and vetted to determine if there are any potential conflicts of commitment duplications of research and our diversion of intellectual property in the performance of federally funded research and in fact through the actions of the chinese talents programs and related programs we have seen exactly this we have seen conflicts of commitment duplications of research and diversion of ip and the performance of NIH funded research the next slide which is i believe the last slide i just want to point out that this is not an NIH effort alone this is very much a team sport many people in NIH have been involved with this ostp the office of science and technology policy is largely coordinating this and it's been a great pleasure for us to work with kelvin droga mayer helena fu and erin myles there we have very close working relationships with the department of justice with fbi with the director of national intelligence with the office of the inspector general within our department of dhhs there are international efforts that are that are ongoing and this the state department has reached out to numerous other countries we've been part of those conversations we've also had the opportunity to work with non-federal organizations including aau koga apou amc and fasab and then dozens of vprs and institutional compliance and integrity leaders around the country whom we've had the opportunity to work with to discover the nature of the kind of problems that we're dealing with so i i hope you found this interesting and informative and i would be happy to hear any thoughts or questions that you might have okay thank you mike it was most illuminating i have several hands that have already gone up so trey idecker steven rich and sharon pawn trey why don't you start us off i think thanks thanks mike i agree with rudy that was a really illuminating presentation and i think that that for all of this to have the right perception it's important that all of this information be put into the right context so that it's not seen as as some kind of witch hunt or or um ascertainment bias extradition exercise as we're all sensitive to so so what would be great to have along with all of these these reports and i agree some of it is egregious is the greater context of what's going on with regards to a worldwide analysis so so for instance china isn't the only country as you know that is competitive with the us i remember once i was many years ago a standing member of an e u grants uh panel where all the criteria were similar to nih except for a sixth criterion which was competitiveness with us which was i i found bizarre but it was it just was part of the review um so have has your office thought about a complete report looking at overlaps you know these these different areas you mentioned overlapping grant commitments we all know that scientists love to play the game of repurposing uh stuff and and a certain amount is appropriate as long as it can be separated and and so have you know can we place this this particular uh a range of offenses in that greater context of a complete analysis of of the overlapping grants a complete analysis of people's dual appointments including with private sector appointments i just was while during her talk i was finding a really interesting editorial piece on the effectiveness of dual appointments in academia and industry and and and that kind of thing um and then also in peer review we we know that there were lots of conflicts in peer review way beyond what what you're mentioning anyway i think i made my point i think it's a great presentation and it and it just needs to be delivered in the right context thank you thank you i uh completely agree uh this is very much a work in progress we do not know what the scale of this is yet we know that there are other countries that have similar kinds of um stealth talents recruitment programs though not at the same scale as china one is russia we have a handful of cases right now that do involve russia um but uh in a way part of what the uh the counterintelligence task force program is all about is to get a much better handle on on where this is we don't know what the scale of this is yet we're not we're not there yet and and what you're what you're saying is absolutely spot on steve rich yes hi mike thanks so much for your presentation and it's good to see you again uh one of the things that at least at our institution uh we've been pushing is complete transparency and you know talking to all of our faculty about any type of relationship should be included but it strikes me that like many things you talk about it once and it has impact but if you don't talk about it again for the next you know year two years three years it it really starts wearing off and people forget have other things is there a way that you know i guess nih or others i mean we had this webinar just recently like as you said are recording a presentation on this but it seems like there has to be some sort of specific training almost in place to to really help make this a real impactful approach yes so steve completely agree ostp this is something that kelvin droga mayer alluded to in his recent talk to the federal demonstration partnership so ostp is working on various guidance documents toolkits and materials for institutions and we hope that that will come out fairly soon and in addition part of the counterintelligence task force efforts is exactly what you say is instruction education outreach to um to institutions that would be continuous so that um so that this the vigilance will always be there we have to find the right balance between an appropriate level of vigilance so that um people are careful and and don't do the wrong thing and that institutions are on top of what's going on but at the same time we don't want we don't want people to forget on the one hand and we don't want this to be overbearing on the other that's the that's the challenge yeah thank you okay i've got sharon plon steve fodor and rafael irisari sharon go ahead well thank you for that presentation um i always grew up being called the girl scout so it was really sort of hard to listen to um but i just wanted to make a couple of quick points so with regard to the last comment as you mentioned the texas medical center was one of the early places that the fda fbi came to visit and the baler has set up an entire new system which interestingly is called disclosure of interest not conflict of interest um and is an entire web based system that we have to use for every grant every submission um everything so i do think that there will be sort of a sea change i didn't want to follow up on tray that obviously your talk today focused on china and certainly throughout my academic career i've had colleagues from all parts of the world who have very proudly talked about having trainees in their home country going to their home country for the summer um trying to support the science in their home institution and to be honest i have no idea what was disclosed or not disclosed so i do think having some really clear metrics on how or instruction on how that can be done appropriately because we don't want it to look like we're walling you off once you come here and that you can't provide your expertise back to the country you're from which may be one of the reasons you came to the united states to begin with so i think in addition to showing all the ways it was done wrong it would be really nice in a talk like this to give some of examples of how it has been done correctly where it was disclosed and it has been successful relationship i think that would go a long way i think you're i think there are a number of graduate students who are very concerned about the issues around military service and obviously there are many countries that actually require military service for all young individuals so you could find a picture of almost anyone from that country in a uniform and so i i do think again it's really important to clarify what does prior military and i'm sure you've investigated in these cases but again i don't want to give the impression that anyone who's had military service then falls under the suspicion that they didn't disclose on their fellowship application that five years ago they served in their country's military just as every other person from their country does yeah these are all great points totally agree we actually have seen some examples of where things have gone well so for my next time i do this i'll i'll give that as an example regarding the military the the concern you're right there are countries in the world where there's universal conscription but the concern here is people who are employed by the military and are basically coming to the united states to work in the laboratory as part of their military assignment and they do not disclose when they're asked this is standard visa application they're asked are you currently on active service with the military and and they don't disclose that and there's a reason why steve fodor please hey mike thanks a lot for that really good presentation that was it was uh good to see the overview and a lot of the comments are excellent i one thing i just wanted to clarify or maybe return to which is you sort of started off the conversation and the presentation on disclosure and conflict of interest and so on and then there was sort of a segue as we went in that when we got into you know the sort of trade secret theft intellectual property theft and so on and just think it's probably important to really separate those two the conflict of interest disclosure and so on is very clear cut uh and very easy to understand um but i noticed the the latter presentations especially coming out of the the government and so on were much more about theft of intellectual property and i think it's been pointed out a number of times here there are all sorts of situations where we have a free and open research enterprise in the united states we have people from companies that visit research labs we have people from academics companies to visit research labs there's different types of disclosures about all those things and so on but is this is this really focused on transparency and disclosure um and if it is that it's important to really distinguish that from the incidence of um you know intellectual property theft and i just wanted to get your thoughts on thank you so uh our focus here at nih is primarily on transparency and disclosure because as you say most of the science that we well all the science that we fund is unclassified and um and most of the science that we fund um is not directly connected to IP with a capital I capital P so um i'll give you a to to illustrate this one recent report we received from a uh from a major university described how their scientists had a um basically a full-time job in China had not disclosed that his laboratory in the united states was falling apart nobody knew where where this guy was and in the meantime he was telling them that he was working there um full time so he was effectively taking um university property and using it to build his uh his operation in china and his time I mean if you think about another thing that was going on was the university was entitled to 12 months of his time and they weren't getting that they were maybe getting two months of his time and it manifested itself by a complete absence of disclosure um and transparency so from our end here at nih our primary focus is disclosure and transparency raffaella hi thanks yep just finding the immune button yeah thanks for the presentation I the my my main suggestion is that we make that uh very easily available to everybody to the public I know this is open session so it's it's currently public but uh I would I would like to to share this presentation with many people um as soon as possible uh so so you you showed us some clear cut examples and one of the reasons I think you should share it because I I I've heard people describe this as a witch hunt as was said earlier but it clearly isn't there's clearly something going on and and by by seeing your presentation I think people will be convinced that this is an actual concern um so that's my first point but the the one thing I wanted to maybe get some advice on you you presented some very obvious cases I think it it would be useful to see some more ambiguous ones too and maybe ones that aren't a problem because I can see now institutions uh overreacting to this in a sense I mean I I think we we definitely want to be careful and this is why I think we need to make this very public but there's also you can see how university will now be concerned about not disclosing something so they want to disclose every single thing and then it it creates a lot of work for everybody maybe unnecessarily including for the NIH so one of the specific instances of this that I've already seen happening a bit is open source software where you get contributions from people and sometimes people start working on your software uh without pay and something many times they're from other countries and sometimes this software is part of of work that is being funded by the NIH so that that could become quite cumbersome to have to start disclosing every person that helps uh sometimes we don't even know their name sometimes we only know they're like their handle on github so that's one and the other one is short term visitors from other country students that want to learn from us I'm thinking of all countries so someone wants to come spend three months in our lab as a visitor and they have funding from the other country so under the definitions I'm listening to here it seems like that would be something that needs to be disclosed as a foreign contribution to my to a lab or maybe not so I guess my my request is that we also show some cases where first some ambiguous ones that that are a problem and then maybe some some cases that aren't so that people can see the different uh the different cases and which ones are a problem which ones aren't also we could have like a very clear policy written up that that describes what is and what is and something that needs to be disclosed right um thank you very much I I agree um I one thing we could also share is we have a new website that we've put up um some of it has been uh inspired by what various universities around the country have done so we'll we'll be happy to share that with you it's got a lot of material um on there and this presentation that I just gave is public you you can share it with anybody including including the the your your description because that was great like like your your voice over yeah I this is being recorded so yeah this is public yeah this will be posted on iag no tv our youtube channel this will all be public you'll help you could point to it very easily okay yeah sure it's just that this is more than just the presentation it would be nice to just have that part you know you can point people to the right minute so mike if you're not part of a law enforcement agency is it possible to discover foreign if individuals have foreign funding yes it's and and actually it's in some cases it's remarkably uh easy um but if this is like um diagnosis in medicine if you don't know what you're looking for you're not going to find it um so uh one way um that in fact our program staff started to discover problems um several years ago at the same time that we were working with the fbi some of our program staff started knocking on the door and saying we're seeing some weird things here can you explain this so what you look at is you look at the published record you look at publications and in the publications they will cite foreign affiliations and foreign grants that don't appear in your grant records and that's the first clue that that something is going on and they have to do that they have to cite those um those foreign affiliations and foreign grants because that's how they get credit for um for the work that they do um so that's that's the first clue the second is is that if if you're a number of institutions um clearly have cultures where um where accountability is taken seriously and so they get tips um and so institutions have received anonymous tips we have received anonymous tips some of these tips are remarkably detailed and then you follow up on those tips um and find out that there's a problem okay we have another question from Jeff Botkin yeah thank you again I guess my comment sort of follows up on that observation I know the NIH conflict of interest process and rules pretty well and that really is focused almost exclusively on the disclosure and identification of issues and very little on how to manage those or what the standards and expectations are and I think a big part of the problem in this whole domain is a lot of the people who are getting into this sort of difficulty are the most senior people are the most productive uh and influential people at institutions and so it makes it very difficult for institutions to politically do uh what they ought to be doing and so hopefully in this process uh standards for responding to these sorts of conflicts and expectations at the institutional level will help institutions not only identify the issues but take strong stands on them thank you okay last call for questions for Mike Mike thank you very much really engaging presentation and as Eric noted his slides and his recording will be available and for you to download and to distribute so um thank you goodbye Mike thank you for the rest of the council members and visitors we're about two hours 15 minutes into the council meeting let's take a break now do not disconnect from the zoom meeting just mute your microphones and we'll see you back here we'll resume open session with the presentation on concepts at 2 15 p.m east coast time okay