On December 9, 2010, the FBI arrested Zaosong Zheng, a 31-year-old Chinese doctor who was a visiting scholar at Harvard Medical School, for attempting to fly 21 vials of cancer cells back to China from Boston Airport. Recently, the case has been brought to light, with Zaosong formally pleading guilty in court on December 3.
According to the Harvard University newspaper, on December 3, Zheng Zao Song formally pleaded guilty in court. In the plea, he agreed to leave the United States after his sentencing hearing on January 6, 2021. However, a federal judge will decide whether he faces further punishment.
Airport Arrest
In 2018, Zheng Zaosong, a doctoral student at Sun Yat-sen University in China, joined Harvard Medical School’s Beith Medical Center as a visiting scholar, focusing on bladder and kidney cancer.
On December 10, 2019, Zheng Zaozong was planning to fly back to China, but he was arrested at Boston Logan Airport.
U.S. Customs found 21 bottles of an unknown brown liquid with typed and handwritten instructions and notes in Zheng Zaosong’s checked luggage. The vials had been carefully packaged and stuffed into socks.
Customs suspected that the vials “contained biological materials that were not properly declared or packaged. Zheng Zaosong was then taken to the “dark room” for questioning.
At first, Zheng Zaosong denied that the vials had anything to do with his research, saying, “These vials are all unimportant.
As the questioning progressed, Zheng Zaosong was eventually forced to admit that he had stolen and copied some of his colleagues’ research samples from his own lab.
He told the authorities that when he returned to China, he planned to study the samples and publish a paper under his own name in order to develop his own research career. Zheng Zaozong was subsequently arrested.
U.S. authorities said that, as a scientist, he was suspected of stealing research results from U.S. laboratories.
Federal prosecutors said Zheng Zaozong could be charged with transporting stolen property or stealing trade secrets, a felony that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
Immediately after his arrest, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a division of Harvard Medical School, fired Zheng Zaosong and said they would actively cooperate with the police investigation. Zheng Zaosong’s visa has also been revoked.
In addition, court documents show that police detectives learned more about Zheng Zao Song during a search of his apartment.
Li, his former roommate and fellow medical researcher, told them that Zheng Zao Song had packed up all of his belongings before he left on December 9, indicating that he no longer intended to return to the United States.
Beginning in 2018, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the FBI began cracking down on intellectual property theft in the biomedical field, and are currently investigating hundreds of cases, many of which involve Chinese scientists.
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On January 28, 2020, U.S. prosecutors filed a lawsuit against Charles Lieber, accusing him of receiving a monthly salary of up to US$50,000 and annual living expenses of US$150,000 from Wuhan University of Technology (WUT), which in addition provided him with US$1.5 million to build a laboratory in Wuhan.
On May 13, 2020, Wang Qing, a former employee of the Cleveland Clinic and scholar of the “Thousand Talents Program”, was arrested at his home. He was charged with wire fraud and failure to inform the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of his participation in the Thousand Talents Program.
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