A former top scientist from Harvard University has defected to China – giving the country an edge in the global race to develop the world’s first AI super-soldier.
Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, has resurfaced as the founding director of Shenzhen’s Institute for Brain Research Advanced Interfaces and Neurotechnologies, also known as i-BRAIN.
Scientists in the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party have been working on brain-computer interfaces — Lieber is one of the world’s leading researchers in the field — to boost mental agility and situational awareness to engineer super soldiers.
Lieber’s lab, based on his three decades of work at Harvard where he received at least $8 million in funding from the Department of Defense, is entirely bankrolled by the communist government, which declared brain-computer interface work a “national priority” in its latest five-year plan released in March.
The Ivy League scientist was convicted in 2021 of lying to the feds about his ties to the Thousand Talents Program, a Chinese state scheme to poach foreign researchers. He was promised $750,000 a year to set up a research lab in China while he was at Harvard, and hid funds he received from the Internal Revenue Service.
He was placed on administrative leave from Harvard after his arrest and retired in 2023, having only served two days in prison for the conviction.
Lieber’s new role was announced in China last year but went unreported until a Reuters investigation broke the news this week.
In his state-funded lab in Shenzhen — which in the last decades morphed from fishing village to China’s Silicon Valley — he has better resources than he did in the US, with unfettered access to primate research facilities he didn’t have at Harvard and top chip-making equipment, the investigation found.
His lab sits within a sprawling campus of institutions bankrolled by billions of dollars from the CCP, with signs saying, “Innovate with the Party.” A Reuters reporter tried to deliver a letter to Lieber but was denied access.
Lieber has been recruiting researchers to conduct studies on monkeys as models for human brain-computer interfaces, according to a September post on his lab’s website.
He took at least one other top scientist with him from Harvard. Jung Min Lee, an expert in stitching electronics into brain tissue, joined him at i-BRAIN as research associate professor, according to its website.
In a rare interview he gave since moving to China, Lieber recently told Nature magazine, “We decided to move elsewhere since I cannot do this in the US any longer.”
He claimed his work “benefits all of humanity.”
“Personally, my own goals are to make Shenzhen a world leader,” he told a government conference in the tech hub in December.
While he was on a two-year supervised release following his meager two days in prison, Lieber was allowed to travel at least three times to China in 2024, including one instance a US district judge granted for “employment networking,” according to court documents.
His conviction had been one of the most high-profile cases of a Department of Justice initiative launched during the first Trump administration to counter Chinese espionage and intellectual-property theft, that was scrapped under President Joe Biden after receiving criticism for racial profiling.
with Post wires
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