Charles Lieber

Charles Lieber   (scientist)
Born	1959 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
Nationality	US
Interests	• chemistry • nanotechnology
Nanoscience expert arrested by US authorizes on January 28, 2020.

Professor Charles M. Lieber is a US chemist interested in nanotechnology. He was arrested in 2020. He admitted to taking tens of thousands of dollars from China.

Activities

"According to his charging documents, Dr. Lieber first went to the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT), in November 2011 to participate in a nanotechnology forum, which was when he was recruited into a bribery scheme that would net him several million dollars to “establish a research lab and conduct research at WUT,” which became known as ”Joint Nano Key Laboratory,” as well as mentor and advocate for graduate students. By 2015, Dr. Lieber appeared to be fairly intimately involved with what seemed to begin as simply a nanotechnology lab, but now had shifted to involve biology as well, since he described visiting the lab multiple times per year “as we try to build up the nano-bio part of the lab.”"

Research

Lieber has created a transistor so small it can be used to penetrate cell membranes and probe their interiors, without disrupting function. The transistor (yellow) sits near the bend in a hairpin-shaped, lipid-coated silicon nanowire. Its scale is similar to that of intra-cellular structures such as organelles (pink and blue orbs) and actin filaments (pink strand).

For decades, Lieber has been working to develop nanoelectronics-enabled cellular tools in order to record and modulate neuronal activity in the brain. Lieber called his early work in using nanowires to connect neurons “revolutionary.” He suggested that it can be used to record and influence brain activity and “opens the possibility for hybrid circuits that couple the strengths of digital nanoelectronic and biological computing components.”

Arrest

"Lieber's research group at Harvard had received over $15 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense, which requires disclosing foreign financial conflicts of interests. The complaint alleges that Lieber had lied about his affiliation with the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and a contract he had with a Chinese talent recruitment plan to attract high-level scientists to the country. He was being paid $50,000 per month by the Chinese university and given $1.5 million to establish a nanoscience research lab at WUT, the complaint said."

Cover up

In February 2020, Snopes reported that "The conspiracy theory that the new coronavirus is a bioweapon developed in a lab is unfounded and has been dismissed by several leading researchers. Lieber has no known connections to the 2020 outbreak of coronavirus."

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