A doctoral student from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, identified as Zheng, was also a visiting PhD student at Harvard University (reportedly on a J-1 visa), mainly researching bladder cancer and kidney cancer. On December 10, 2019, Zheng was arrested at Boston Logan Airport and charged with making false and fraudulent statements to customs officers.
What happened
US customs officers found 21 bottles of unidentified brown liquid in luggage Zheng was checking back to China. The glass bottles had been carefully wrapped and stuffed into socks.
At first, Zheng denied carrying any biological specimens. But as the questioning continued, he admitted that he had put the small bottles into a bag.
He said the bottles had been given to him by a friend, “Zhang,” and that he had not planned to do anything with them. Shortly afterward, Zheng was taken to a small room, where he admitted that, without anyone knowing, he had stolen 8 vials from the lab and had replicated 11 sample vials based on the research of a colleague, “Tao.” Zheng planned to take these specimens to a lab where he had previously worked in China for further research. If the research succeeded, he could then publish a paper under his own name.
In the end, Zheng was arrested, and his visiting status at Harvard Medical School was canceled (reportedly involving his DS-2019). The incident even briefly became a trending topic online.
Is this kind of thing common?
Zheng is not the first Chinese international student or scientist to try to bring biological materials back from the US. In recent years, international academic exchanges and collaboration have become increasingly common, and biological materials used in experiments often need to be shared across borders. To protect the interests of the original inventors, many academic institutions or professors sign a Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) when cooperating with one another. Some people have also taken samples back without signing an MTA. One international student said enforcement used to be lax: “We used to carry them with us, and we would not bring this many.” But over the past two years, things have changed. In 2018, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the FBI began cracking down on intellectual property theft in the biomedical field. As of November 2019, they were investigating about 180 cases, many of which involved ethnically Chinese scientists.
Perhaps some people cut corners because they think an MTA is too much trouble. After signing an MTA, shipping also has to go through multiple rounds of review, so they instead use checked luggage to transport bottled cells directly. Maybe airport inspections were not as strict before, but this is no longer an era when you can count on getting lucky.
In the author’s view, signing an MTA is a necessary part of normal academic exchange and cooperation. Also, as far as the author knows, for items that require review before transport, Chinese customs is generally stricter than US customs. If your paperwork is complete, it is relatively easy to ship materials legally or leave the US with compliant items. Although Chinese customs review upon entry may take some time, it usually is not excessively long, so there is no need to take such risks.
We have previously also covered another case involving a Chinese student arrested over gift cards. See the following articles:
https://www.uscreditcards101.com/chinese-national-student-arrested-in-rogers-for-nation-million-dollar-walmart-gift-card-scam/
https://www.uscreditcards101.com/why-fan-xia-was-arrested/