
Scientists with Links to China May Be Stealing Biomedical Research, U.S. Says - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/health/china-nih-scientists.html
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scohesc
It's good to see the US Government and the N.I.H taking better precautions on
data and research security - China has had a track record for sneakily
exporting scientific/medical/_everything_ information from other countries for
years now and I think the USA along with other countries are wising up to it
now.

As to the allegations of racism - unfortunately due to human nature and the
sensitivity of the issue, there of course will be some racial bias against the
Chinese. I hope the majority will be able to sense this and reconsider their
thoughts before they come actions.

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yummypaint
This bothers me much less than other examples of china's ip theft. The
research still gets done. Patients still reap the benefits, researchers
publish as usual. Having the data stolen can only increase the probability of
applications being developed. This is the whole point of publishing research
anyway. The rent seekers who run pharma companies may lose money, but i just
cant make myself care.

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sushid
I agree that the net effect for the world might be nearly equal but it’s still
inherently unfair for the US and those who attempted to conduct the research
in a US institution.

You’re discounting the loss or setback of career for the US based researchers.

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dependenttypes
This seems to be an instance of "intellectual property theft", which makes me
wonder, isn't the research from these universities published on academic
journals anyway? Are they being accused to be "stealing" from the journals or
what?

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scohesc
I would assume that some of the data being stolen is from current, on-going,
potentially high confidentiality research projects - otherwise this wouldn't
be making headlines.

The article is also saying that as part of doing medical research at the NIH,
you cannot accept financial contributions from the "Thousand Talents" program
in China. It seems like the article is more about researchers breaking
important conflict-of-interest policies and it just happens that those
researchers are mostly chinese and the stolen data is being exported to China.

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luckydata
How does the title go from "Vast Dragnet Targets Theft of Biomedical Secrets
for China" to the one in this comment thread? The original is much closer to
the spirit of the original article.

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osiaq
No way

