America’s Spy-Busters Put Secret-Stealing Chinese ‘Grad Students’ Under Microscope

The seal of the F.B.I. hangs in the Flag Room at the bureau's headquaters in Washington, D.C., on March 9, 2007. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The FBI last month arrested Gang Chen, a well-known MIT nanotechnologist, and charged the China-born naturalized American with concealing close and lucrative connections to China’s scientific and technological establishment on his applications for federal research grants.

Chen, who has pleaded not guilty and is supported by MIT, is not the only prominent academic figure to be arrested and charged with failing to disclose connections to Chinese research institutes. At least half a dozen have been arrested in the last year or so. They include Charles Lieber, the chair of the Harvard University Chemistry Department, who is accused of concealing his participation in an ambitious, state-sponsored Chinese effort to recruit top scientists and engineers from around the world to work in China.