Within a week of receiving an email from Lauer on 6 November 2018, University of Connecticut (UConn), Storrs, officials had removed Wang, a tenured professor of physiology and neurobiology, from her NIH grant and denied her access to the mice she used to study liver metabolism.
But senior administrators soon decided NIH’s claims that Wang held a position at Wenzhou Medical University and had received a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China did not hold up. “There is sufficient evidence to show that Dr. Wang is not formally affiliated” with Wenzhou, UConn’s then–vice president for research, Radenka Maric, wrote Lauer on 21 November, and that the grant “was in fact awarded to a different Li Wang.”
Lauer wasn’t willing to accept those results, according to emails obtained by Science from UConn through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. On 28 November, Lauer wrote Maric, now UConn’s president, that there were “at least four publications” that listed “Dr. Wang-UConn as affiliated with Wenzhou” and reminded Maric “to consider those publications as part of your ongoing reviews.” Lauer also told Maric that “NIH thought a reasonable person would consider it more likely than not that Dr. Wang-UConn received financial support for her research” from the Chinese grant.
Lauer suggested UConn officials contact the FBI, and in a subsequent email Maric told Lauer it had given UConn “additional information regarding Chinese talent programs, foreign affiliations, and key search terms.” UConn used FBI techniques to search Wang’s emails, she told Lauer, and obtained “a forensic image of [Wang’s] laptop … that appear to contradict her denials.”
UConn then changed its mind about Wang’s innocence. “We cannot certify Dr. Wang as being honest, trustworthy and forthright,” Maric told Lauer on 19 February 2019.
91%
For 225 of the cases China was the country of concern.
85%
199 of the targeted scientists are men.
81%
182 of the targeted scientists self-reported as Asian.
One month later, UConn banned Wang, who at one point held five NIH grants, from applying for NIH funding for 3 years, and in July the university decided to fire her. Wang resigned on 19 September 2019, 1 day before her termination went into effect.
Wang had already filed a grievance, which was rejected. But she had another way to fight back: A collective bargaining agreement gives UConn faculty the right to seek outside, binding arbitration in employment disputes.
Wang took advantage of that mechanism, in which an independent arbitrator conducts its own inquiry and issues a ruling that both parties have agreed to accept. The quasi-judicial process, which includes testimony from both sides, was conducted by the American Arbitration Association (AAA), and in November 2021 its arbitrator ruled in Wang’s favor. In a 56-page decision, AAA’s Peter Adomeit ordered UConn to pay Wang $1.4 million in compensation for being suspended and terminated “without just cause.”
Wang declined to speak with Science, and her lawyer said a nondisclosure agreement prevents him or Wang from discussing the case. UConn officials also declined comment.
Adomeit’s ruling, which Science obtained from UConn through its FOIA request, excoriated UConn officials for an investigation it characterized as deeply flawed.
“[Interim Provost John] Elliott’s claim that the University ‘has lost confidence’ in Dr. Wang is true,” Adomeit wrote. “But it was their fault, not hers. They relied on false evidence. [Wang] tried to correct them, but they wouldn’t listen.”
“They ‘lost confidence’ because they only listened to one side of the story,” the decision continued. “Their minds were closed. They had no interest in contrary evidence.”
Adomeit found the university’s use of the results from its audit of Wang’s computer to be especially egregious, criticizing lead investigator Michelle Williams’s analysis. “Dr. Williams reached her conclusions without conducting metadata analysis on whether Dr. Wang wrote, modified, or accessed the computer data,” Adomeit wrote. Williams, he explained, “became convinced, after visually inspecting the forensic image of Dr. Wang’s computer, that Dr. Wang was lying, despite website evidence to the contrary.”
BESIDES CONDUCTING flawed investigations, some universities seem to have cracked down even harder than NIH demanded. That was the case for UCSD neuroscientist Xiang-Dong Fu.
Fu, who studies neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson’s, was hired by UCSD in 1992 and earned tenure in 1998. That was also the year colleagues at Wuhan University, where Fu did his undergraduate studies, solicited his help in building up their research programs.
“You are already coming [to Wuhan] to visit your parents, so maybe you can provide some advice to our young faculty and work with their students?” Fu recalls being asked at dinner during one of those visits home. “If you have someone with similar research interests and some students, then I’d be happy to help out,” he says he replied.
Five years later such an opportunity arose, and Fu began to tack on 2 or 3 days at Wuhan every few months after spending a weekend with his parents. In 2005 his hosts formalized his role by naming him a visiting professor, and over the next 3 years he was paid $1000 a month for 2 months’ work with funds from a government program for domestic scholars.
From 2012 to 2016, Fu was again supported by Wuhan through China’s Thousand Talents program, which was created to lure back Chinese-born scientists working abroad. Those who agreed to spend at least 9 months a year in China received generous salaries and lavish research funding. Given his full-time faculty position at UCSD, Fu chose the much less lucrative second tier, which came with a modest monthly stipend. In return, he spent several weeks a year at Wuhan and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Institute for Biophysics, where one of his former Wuhan students was now a faculty member.
- XIANG-DONG FU
- WESTLAKE UNIVERSITY
Although Fu says his superiors knew about and had approved his activities, UCSD officials concluded that Fu had violated NIH’s disclosure rules. In February 2020, UCSD banned him from applying for NIH funding for 4 years.
“They said that I did not follow certain procedures. OK, that’s fair,” Fu says. “I probably failed in many different ways.” A UCSD spokesperson says the university “will not comment” on his case.
Such a ban would have been professionally fatal for most academic biomedical researchers. But a $9 million grant from a philanthropic initiative, Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s, and patient donations allowed Fu to keep his lab going.
NIH told UCSD it regarded Fu’s penalty to be sufficient punishment, according to multiple sources. Science has also learned that Brenner, now head of the neighboring Sanford Burnham Prebys research institute, told top UCSD officials he opposed any further sanctions. But UCSD continued to investigate Fu’s ties to China. In a May 2021 report it concluded Fu had repeatedly violated UCSD’s code of conduct for faculty pertaining to conflicts of commitment.
14
In 6% of 246 cases, the National Institutes of Health agreed with institutions that NIH policies had not been violated.
Fu didn’t learn about the second investigation until July 2021 and didn’t receive a copy of it until 6 months after that. In the interim he was invited to reply to the report, sight unseen, but told he “could not dispute the investigator’s findings.”
In January 2022, Fu was given the choice of either resigning or accepting a 4-year, unpaid suspension from the university that would ban him from campus and his lab. In March Executive Vice Chancellor Elizabeth Simmons submitted an official request that Fu be terminated, and in late April a faculty disciplinary committee recommended he be suspended without pay for 2 years.
Fu filed a grievance, contending that many of the report’s findings were incorrect and that the university had failed to follow its own procedures. More than 100 UCSD faculty members petitioned to lighten Fu’s penalty, saying the continued prosecution of Fu “appeared rigged to assure the University lawyers would win their case rather than have justice be served.”
UCSD officials never replied, says Christopher Glass, a professor of cellular medicine at UCSD who organized the petition, nor did Fu get a response to his grievance. On 5 December 2022, Fu “reluctantly resigned” after being told his 2-year campus suspension would go into effect on 1 January 2023.
Last month he accepted a position with the fledgling Westlake University, China’s first private research university. There he hopes to spend the next few years refining a technique to convert brain cells called astrocytes into new neurons. His goal is to validate the controversial approach and use it to develop possible treatments for neurodegenerative diseases. “I don’t need a huge lab, and I don’t need 10 years,” 66-year-old Fu says. “But I still have a dream to chase.”
His move to China represents a huge loss for U.S. science, says Glass, who occupied an office next to Fu for 30 years. “He’s an amazing scientist, incredibly productive,” Glass says. “You couldn’t ask for a better next-door neighbor.”
EVEN FOR SCIENTISTS who keep their U.S. jobs after surviving NIH scrutiny, the experience can take a heavy toll. Guan had rocketed up the academic ladder after joining UM’s biological chemistry department in 1992. A 1999 profile in its alumni magazine that marked his MacArthur genius award the previous year called him “one of the great scientific minds of his generation.”
His success in elucidating the cell signaling pathways involved in organ development and cancer attracted Fudan’s attention, leading to the joint lab he set up with Xiong. The collaboration was no secret.
“My [then-]dean even offered to install a video conference link so it would be easier for me to communicate with people at Fudan,” Guan recalls. And when Guan joined the UCSD faculty in 2007, he says his new bosses “were fully aware and very supportive of the collaboration.”
Once Lauer’s letter arrived in late 2018, Guan says, he cooperated fully with UCSD’s investigation. “Whatever they asked for, I gave it to them,” he says. “Passwords. My passport. All my travel records. I had a contract with Fudan University, and I gave them a copy of that.” He also relinquished his existing NIH grants.
In 2019, the university concluded he had violated its code of conduct by failing to disclose research support from foreign sources and banned him from applying for NIH funding for 2 years. Guan says his work in China “was totally irrelevant” to what NIH was funding him to do, although he acknowledges he was “inconsistent” in reporting income from Fudan.
Guan says he never received a letter describing the allegations he was facing or a report on the outcome of the university’s investigation. But, “UCSD did what it could” to keep his lab afloat, he says, and he was able to win new NIH awards once the suspension ended in 2021. Even so, his lab has shrunk dramatically, and he’s no longer taking on new graduate students for fear that he won’t be able to support them for the duration of their training.
His love of science has also suffered.
“I used to work very hard,” he says. “Now, sometimes, I wonder what was the point of all the effort I made.”
“And I’m one of the lucky ones,” he continues. “I don’t know how many people that NIH wanted to stop are able to start again. Maybe none.”
