Science_-_7_February_2020_UserUpload.Net

614 7 FEBRUARY 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6478 sciencemag.org SCIENCE

W

orld-renowned inorganic chem-

ist Charles Lieber has become the

most prominent U.S. researcher to

face charges stemming from un-

disclosed ties to Chinese research

institutions. The Harvard Univer-

sity professor’s 28 January arrest on charges

of making false statements about those col-

laborations has also shined a spotlight on a

15-month campaign by federal prosecutors

aimed at blunting China’s aggressive efforts

to acquire cutting-edge technologies.

In an interview last week with Science,

Andrew Lelling, U.S. attorney for the Massa-

chusetts district and part of a Department

of Justice (DOJ) team leading its China Ini-

tiative, said Lieber’s entanglements could

have made him vulnerable to pressure

from the Chinese government. “It was the

amount of money involved that drew our

attention,” Lelling says, referring to a 2012

contract included in court documents that

indicate Lieber received up to $50,000 a

month in salary and millions of dollars in

research support. “That is a corrupting level

of money.”

Lieber made things worse, Lelling says,

by hiding that relationship from Harvard

and federal agencies, including the Depart-

ment of Defense, that have for decades

funded his research. “When people begin

to hide things, that’s when law enforcement

authorities get all excited.”

Lieber has not been accused of trans-

ferring sensitive technology to China or

economic espionage, that is, the theft of in-

tellectual property.

Lelling and four other U.S. attorneys are

managing the China Initiative, launched in

November 2018. It has focused on what DOJ

calls “nontraditional collaborators,” and

Lelling says the vast majority of the cases

Prosecutor

details China

probe that

snared chemist

Department of Justice

initiative aims to counter

“corrupting” influence of

foreign money on scientists

FOREIGN INFLUENCE

By Jeffrey Mervis

NEWS | IN DEPTH

interactions strengthen animal personali-
ties and can help a population survive. They
ran simulations of the experiments to see
whether the data patterns could be real. The
results were suspicious. “We were simply
finding there were too many replicates of the
same data points,” Dingemanse says.
He then approached Pruitt’s co-author,
Kate Laskowski, a behavioral ecologist at UC
Davis, and Daniel Bolnick, editor-in-chief of
The American Naturalist. Laskowski found
more questionable data, first in that paper
and then in two others she’d co-authored
with Pruitt; in each case, he had been the
sole source of the animal data. Pruitt offered
several explanations for these anomalies,
Laskowski and Bolnick say, but ultimately,
he agreed to a retraction of the initial paper,
which the journal announced on 17 January.
Bolnick, a behavioral ecologist at the
University of Connecticut, Storrs, then re-
ceived dozens of emails,
some anonymous, ex-
pressing unease with
other papers involving
Pruitt. He forwarded
those emails to the re-
search integrity office at
McMaster and alerted
other journals. He also
recruited another editor
at his journal and out-
side Pruitt’s field, Jeremy
Fox of the University of
Calgary, to analyze the
ecologist’s body of work.
Fox found many more data anomalies,
even in Pruitt’s Ph.D. thesis on spiders.
Bolnick then blogged on the matter and
announced the creation of an online spread-
sheet compiling Pruitt papers, with details
about how the data in each were originally
collected and how they are now being re-
analyzed. So far, 23 journals are evaluating
Pruitt’s papers, he says. (The second retrac-
tion was in the Proceedings of the Royal So-
ciety B. Biology Letters may retract one next.)
“I’m very concerned that people collaborating
with him will be tarred with the same brush,”
Bolnick adds. “There are definitely papers
out there [co-authored by Pruitt] where other
people collected the data, and I consider
those papers to be sound and trustworthy.”
Noa Pinter-Wollman, a behavioral eco-
logist at UC Los Angeles, is among those sud-
denly re-evaluating her work. She teamed
up with Pruitt 5 years ago to apply network
analysis to Pruitt’s spider data, and together
they’ve published almost 20 papers. Pruitt
alerted her to the first retraction 2 weeks ago,
and she has been scrambling ever since. “We
are focusing on data collected and curated by
Jonathan,” she says, searching for irregulari-
ties such as duplicated information or certain

sequences of numbers that don’t have the ex-

pected randomness. “This is the type of fo-

rensics that I never imagined I would have

to do.” Already, she says she’s found three pa-

pers she wants to retract and has concerns

about three more.

Pinter-Wollman cosigned a public state-

ment released 29 January by Ambika

Kamath, a behavioral ecologist at UC Berke-

ley and former Pruitt postdoc, and by some

former and current Pruitt lab members and

collaborators promising to get to the bot-

tom of these problems. “We are working

as a community to create a resource about

which papers are reliable,” Pinter-Wollman

says. “But it’s a tragedy for me. I lost a

trusted collaborator.”

Outgoing and energetic, Pruitt has won fa-

vorable press attention (including in Science)

and generous research support: more than

$600,000 in National Science Foundation

funding before Canada

lured him with a grant

of $350,000 annually for

7 years. He is also well-

liked. “I’m devastated,”

says his former gradu-

ate school adviser, Susan

Riechert, a behavioral

ecologist at the University

of Tennessee, Knoxville.

“He’s very sharing of his

work with other people

and [with] credits.”

Pruitt says he is puz-

zled by what’s happening.

“Each morning when I woke up, there was a

different anonymous email taking issue with

a different data set and a different paper,” he

tells Science. “Do they think I was just copy-

ing and pasting a spreadsheet? I don’t think I

would do that.” But that explanation doesn’t

wash for Bolnick, given what he says is seen

in raw data files. “Pruitt’s explanation strikes

me as ludicrously blasé. ... The extent of the

problems is hard to reconcile with accidents.”

Colleagues want him to return home to

address the concerns, but Pruitt says he’s fo-

cusing on setting traps for insects and other

invertebrates before and after cyclones hit

to learn how the destruction affects differ-

ent species—a follow-up on work he did

examining a U.S. East Coast hurricane’s ef-

fects on spiders. That work, published last

year, is now being scrutinized.

The cyclone data will be useful no mat-

ter what happens, Pruitt says. “If I’m on fire

and my longevity is [short], I will bequeath

them to another researcher.”

Even Pruitt’s staunchest supporters now

question his work, however. “I hope that

it all turns out that he’s been careless,”

Riechert says. “But if he has falsified data,

then he has to pay the price.” j

“Pruitt’s explanation

strikes me as

ludicrously blasé. ...

The extent of the

problems is hard to

reconcile with accidents.”

Daniel Bolnick,

The American Naturalist

Published by AAAS