614 7 FEBRUARY 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6478 sciencemag.org SCIENCEW
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 casesProsecutor
details China
probe that
snared chemist
Department of Justice
initiative aims to counter
“corrupting” influence of
foreign money on scientists
FOREIGN INFLUENCEBy Jeffrey MervisNEWS | 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 NaturalistPublished by AAAS