A scientist has been denied access to his lab…because he supported his Chinese students.
A faculty member at Indiana University (IU), who has sharply criticized the government’s recent prosecution of several Chinese scientists accused of smuggling biological materials into the United States, has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders.
IU plant microbiologist Roger Innes says the move Thursday evening is the latest instance of retaliation for a letter he wrote last fall on behalf of Yunqing Jian, a plant scientist postdoc at the University of Michigan who had pled guilty to smuggling biological material and making false statements. The letter to Jian’s attorney, intended to be used at her sentencing, argued that what the Chinese postdoc had transported was not dangerous, but she was still ultimately deported. Her conviction triggered an investigation of Youhuang Xiang, a Chinese postdoc in Innes’ lab, that led to Xiang also pleading guilty last month to smuggling loops of DNA known as plasmids. He was also deported.
Oh no, never criticize the US government.
This sounds like overreach by government agents trying desperately to find excuses to deport Chinese scientists, and taking out an American scientist as collateral damage. If I had foreign students, I would defend them without question, but apparently that will get you shut down in America.
I would love to know the rationale for excluding the PI from the lab, even if his post-docs were guilty of importing nefarious plants. Do they suspect him of plotting to attack the US from his lab in Indiana with evil weeds from China?
Interesting touch: the chair of Innes department is Armin Moczek, an eco-evo-devo guy I know of. He’s going to be watering Innes’ plants while he’s locked out.
All shall bow down before the fascist cult.
I remember the china scare from the early 00s. This all sounds equally well founded.
I’m not clear why any foreigners ever go to the US for research. Europe, Canada, etc seem pretty well plugged in without randomly going after researchers doing research work like everyone else while being the fashionable ethnicity to oppress.
PZ, speaking of Indiana is “howard hershey” still there or retired?
Goes along with the supposed “Chinese labs” ‘found’ in the US recently, which supposedly contained things marked Covid, and other stuff. My immediate thought was, “So.. These idiots raided a Chinese apothecary, which was selling fake, but thanks to the government in the 70s, more or less totally legal, bullshit altie medicine cures, and because the current nuts in office want to attack China, they are going to call it a ‘lab’.” Never, like with all the other bullshit they have pulled, heard a damn thing to contradict this, or seen one scrap of evidence that they “found” anything in it/them, never mind what the F any of it was, if they did. Odd…. But, par for the course for an administration that can hold up a sheet of black fabric and declare its “transparent”, while simultaneously claiming they never saw evidence, facts, or events, that took place in a freaking literal glass house.
Just another example of the war on education by the magat cult and the tiny, diseased, bigoted, money driven minds of university administrators.
They brought Triffids!
Now, setting aside the issue whether these DNA fragments embedded into E. Coli should have to be declared (or do have to be declared), if it’s really about the good doctor trying to understand to defeat funghi, that should be an honourable goal, even if the crops to be protected are also grown in China.
Some fifty years ago, this wouldn’t have been a problem: Even before that, the US willingly sold food to the Soviet paramount leader Chrushchev in order to prevent a hunger crisis. This kind of attitude won the cold war. If the US now drop all ambitions regarding soft power, they’ll be outcompeted, because most people don’t want to help a person that would starve people for political gain and to prove a false bigoted theory.
How many of us can guarantee we’re not carrying plasmids when we travel internationally?