Scientific Freedom and the Totalitarian Threat

Commentary

Former Harvard chemist Charles Lieber, a felon convicted of lying about taking money from the regime in China, is reportedly rebuilding his lab there.

According to U.S. prosecutors, Lieber repeatedly lied to the U.S. government. Now, he reportedly plans to work on the Chinese Communist Party’s priority, which he calls “the brain-machine interface.” Perhaps Lieber’s visit to China for “employment networking,” which was approved by a U.S. federal judge in 2024 after his conviction, helped him land the job.

Lieber’s specialty is nanotechnology. He developed a flexible, injectable nanowire mesh that can wrap around neurons in the brain to monitor them. This could help a future totalitarian regime spy on people’s thoughts, or create supersoldiers directed by artificial intelligence (AI). It’s a brave new world that we should not welcome.

Powered by AI, science could soon advance more rapidly than ever before, and the possibility that this new superscience could enable dictators cannot be ruled out. As usual, science is way ahead of, and largely unregulated by, the ethics and laws that should more rigorously safeguard the freedoms we already have.

Lieber is the latest visible tip of an iceberg of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) scientific and intellectual property theft, acquisition, and espionage that fuels the Chinese regime’s economic growth, military advancements, and threat to the United States and democracy generally.

A 2020 report revealed that starting in 2006, the regime created 600 “talent recruitment stations” worldwide to recruit foreign scientists. The regime paid hometown associations, Chinese student groups, and other organizations globally to do this, with a $29,000 bonus for every recruited scientist. The United States was the biggest target of the program, with at least 146 stations. The CCP’s goal is to make China a scientific superpower by 2035. It would doubtless like to become the top destination for global science by then.

The CCP has no ethic of freedom and allows China’s scientists to engage only with other scientists, hoping that they will bring back what they learn rather than transfer their knowledge abroad. Meanwhile, the United States and other democracies rely on America’s individual freedoms, including scientific and market freedoms, to develop and keep our scientific edge. But that freedom means that science is not exclusively for the benefit of freedom and democracies, but international.

The ethic of scientific freedom typically means that any science developed in the United States, for example, is published and then belongs as much to totalitarian China, dictatorial Russia, and theocratic Iran. Given their adversarial relationships with the United States and democracy, scientific freedom is being used to undermine democratic freedoms in adversary countries, the countries they invade, and, if they have their way, eventually worldwide.

The Lieber case indicates that democracy cannot rely on scientists to self-regulate when it comes to the transfer of science and technology to totalitarian regimes. The argument that the two are completely different ignores the reality that basic scientific advances often rapidly translate into economic and military benefits for the countries that harness them.

Lieber was nurtured in the highest caliber of democratic institutions yet chose to betray democracy by delivering science to a totalitarian adversary. The case raises the question of whether limited restrictions against science serving authoritarianism would be wise to protect the freedoms, including scientific freedom, that we enjoy in democracies. There have certainly been limits on delivering nuclear weapons and AI technology to authoritarian regimes.

Shouldn’t we also limit all other pure sciences, including nanoscience, of which the effects are as yet unknown, from empowering the enemies of freedom?

Scientific freedom should arguably be limited to countries that defend freedom rather than attempt to defeat freedom. There could be a ban on exporting basic sciences of the kind that lead to nuclear and AI revolutions to the enemies of freedom. Otherwise, freedom could become self-defeating.

Aren’t there plenty of opportunities for scientific collaboration among U.S., European, British, Australian, Japanese, Taiwanese, and South Korean universities without adding universities that would further the authoritarian ends of countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea?

China, which has an economy several times as large as all other dictatorships combined, seems to be a favorite of university presidents, scientists, and tech companies. Is there a way to stop this sellout of democratic science to the world’s most powerful authoritarian regime through new legislation? If so, it ought to be coordinated with other leading democracies.

Science can and has been corrupted by money and fame, and without a coordinated approach, scientists who wish to collaborate with the CCP could always go to another democratic country if the United States were to ban that collaboration. These scientists should not enjoy both the freedoms of democracy and the financial resources of totalitarianism.

Laws against collaborating with China’s science and technology institutions, and those in other adversary regimes, should be strengthened to stop the next Lieber from selling out democracy. Lieber’s minimal sentence included no prison time (other than the two days he spent in jail after arrest) and a fine amounting to a small fraction of what he made from China. The sentence was probably light because he showed remorse, and his lawyers argued that he would spend the rest of his days at home. Yet he turned around three years later and left for China to develop a lab that could benefit the CCP from his years of research in the United States, including that funded by U.S. taxpayers.

The case indicates that the U.S. legal system is broken when it comes to defending American freedoms against scientists who choose to betray those freedoms by transferring U.S. science and technology abroad. Export control laws on basic science exports to authoritarian regimes—and bans on scientific collaboration that benefits adversarial dictatorships—should be considered. Individual scientists who collaborate with totalitarian adversaries of the United States should pay the price. Only better laws will reliably deter some scientists from doing the wrong thing, and help focus their collaboration for the benefit of liberty and democracy.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.