The issue isn't collaboration or information-sharing.
The researchers didn't disclose affiliations and violated non-disclosures. Those are pure ethics violations (and conflicts of interest) that undermine research integrity. If they're willing to lie there, what else are they willing to lie about?
Quote from another article:
> The reports say that the researchers failed to disclose international collaborators and that at least one confidential grant application was sent to a scientist in China in violation of federal policy, among other allegations. [0]
Wait, they were fired for showing a grant application to a collaborator? This is something that happens all the time in academia - it's completely normal, regardless of what the rules state (assuming it's their own proposal, which is unclear from the article - as are all these vague accusations). Emory recently fired two tenured Chinese scientists, who are actually quite important in researching Huntington's disease, on similar accusations of hiding their collaborators. The thing is, in the Emory case, the accusations are patently absurd. The collaborators were listed on the papers, and a dean at Emory had approved the collaboration. It looks like the Trump administration is pressuring the NIH, which is pressuring universities, and the people at the bottom are taking the flak.
The researchers didn't disclose affiliations and violated non-disclosures. Those are pure ethics violations (and conflicts of interest) that undermine research integrity. If they're willing to lie there, what else are they willing to lie about?
Quote from another article:
> The reports say that the researchers failed to disclose international collaborators and that at least one confidential grant application was sent to a scientist in China in violation of federal policy, among other allegations. [0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/health/md-anderson-chines...