How this usually works is that samples are relevant to specific experiments. For example, maybe you're testing how some particular genetic modification affects how cancer cells behave in response to some drug, or whatever. These vials of cells would be what you get halfway through such an experiment, after you've treated the cells but before you've had a chance to analyze them. Postdocs and studentships often end midway through projects like this. The raw value of the materials is low, and it might take a postdoc days to weeks to reproduce them, depending on complexity. There is also an extremely high chance that the cells are completely worthless, i.e. that the treatment was botched or inconclusive. If the student hadn't taken the vials, the project might well have been abandoned, due to lack of manpower.
With that background, the morality of "smuggling" these cells is a bit of a gray area. On one hand, they're just incomplete work that the student wants to finish elsewhere. Keeping them is just like me keeping my notebooks when I move, even if I haven't finished solving the equations therein. On the other hand, if the project is finished elsewhere, credit won't properly flow to the affiliation where the work was started. In theoretical physics, we really don't care about this (I just finished a project where 2 members changed affiliation midway through), but in biology there's the cost of facilities, and the local expertise that gets you the raw materials.
So there is an issue here, but I certainly don't think it's worth the hysteria that will unfold in this comments section. I think the real issue is that a lot of people on this site are disgusted at the idea of Chinese people learning science. But to us scientists, the spread of knowledge is a virtue. After all, the end goal of this student would have been to publish in a journal -- which people from any country can access.
> With that background, the morality of "smuggling" these cells is a bit of a gray area.
The grey area here is from lack of foundational knowledge surrounding these cells, and your assumptions aren’t useful (nor are they likely, I suspect, to hold). For example, we have no idea if these cells were originally provided to the lab under an MTA, nor any restrictions placed by the funding source.
> Keeping them is just like me keeping my notebooks when I move, even if I haven't finished solving the equations therein.
This is not a grey area: lab notebooks and lab data are generally speaking the property of the lab. The proper procedure is to request permission to create a copy of them when you move to a new institution. Check your university’s IP policy, it should be the governing rule set.
I thought this was a great comment until the petty jab at the end. Being concerned about this issue and being "disgusted at the idea of Chinese people learning science" are clearly different things. Don't let a few bad apples cloud your view of the rest of us.
If you see such comments you should bring them to our attention by flagging them or, in egregious cases, emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com about them. This is something we moderate heavily:
Skew is inevitable on certain issues given that HN demographics are (though highly international) mostly Western. But that doesn't mean that people get to post slurs or use the site for nationalistic flamewar.
1. The stolen material by these Chinese scientists were worthless and akin to a student taking home a notebook after a lecture.
2. The real issue is here is not of the rampant theft of intellectual property by rogue Chinese scientists, but that Westerners are disgusted by the mere thought of Chinese people learning science.
I didn't need to learn your name ('Zhou') to see that you are another CCP loyalist. And honestly I am quite concerned that a visiting Chinese scientist like yourself holds sympathetic views of these intellectual theft crimes by your countrymen.....
As part of the exact employment contract, a researcher's work may be patented by the institute they work for (with the researcher being remunerated for this).
Biomedical patents are not trivial software patents. Billions of dollars of investment goes into developing a single new therapy. The molecular structure of medicine can often be easily replicated once discovered, so patents are a key part of commercializing new medicine and techniques. (See the CRISPR-Cas9 patent debacle.) Taking the right to patent some work away from the institute it was developed at means theft of the licensing fees derived from the patent, and an impact on an institute's ability to keep funding R&D.
Your typical research doesn't lead to billions in licensing fees. 99% of research produces nothing of direct monetary value at all, and research that does is generally done in startups or pharma/biotech companies, where the rules are far more stringent than in university-affiliated labs. Still, of course you are right that this is all a gray area.
While the vast majority of academic labs aren’t producing finished products like drugs, it’s not uncommon for researchers to obtain patents on certain promising leads.
Most universities have a “tech transfer” office that helps with this (the university usually gets a share) and tries to find licensees.
There isn’t enough information in the linked article to say how unique or important these particular cells are or how difficult they would be to replicate. On the more valuable end could be cells provided by a company for testing (maybe transformed to express some sort of protein they’ve created), or primary cells (isolated from an organism) that are unique in some way, or hybridomas that produce monoclonal antibodies for something druggable or diagnostically relevant.
The Boston Herald article linked by another commentator suggests that in at least one element this case fits the pattern of others that have been appearing: the accused is receiving funds from the Chinese government under an ostensible scholar program. In some of the other cases, such as with the Thousand Talents program, the scholars signed contracts that agreed to disclose or assign IP only to the Chinese institutions, conceal the source of funding for studies (both to journals or funding agencies), or agree to work at the Chinese institutions in excess of the norms for visiting appointments. The Thousand Talents program and others like it are a coordinated, calculated, and deliberate effort run by the Chinese government, not the accidental missteps of some aloof academics.
Honestly, that just sounds like the usual rules for academic funding, phrased in a conspiratorial way. Would you also call NSF funding "a coordinated, calculated, and deliberate effort run by the American government"? Is science good for nothing but proxy war to you?
> conceal the source of funding for studies (both to journals or funding agencies)
doesn't sound like the usual rules for academic funding. I heavily doubt whether the Thousand Talents program really has such a rule. It's the exact opposite of what organizations funding scientific research usually want: getting their name acknowledged in as many papers in prestigious journals as possible, in order to demonstrate success.
With that background, the morality of "smuggling" these cells is a bit of a gray area. On one hand, they're just incomplete work that the student wants to finish elsewhere. Keeping them is just like me keeping my notebooks when I move, even if I haven't finished solving the equations therein. On the other hand, if the project is finished elsewhere, credit won't properly flow to the affiliation where the work was started. In theoretical physics, we really don't care about this (I just finished a project where 2 members changed affiliation midway through), but in biology there's the cost of facilities, and the local expertise that gets you the raw materials.
So there is an issue here, but I certainly don't think it's worth the hysteria that will unfold in this comments section. I think the real issue is that a lot of people on this site are disgusted at the idea of Chinese people learning science. But to us scientists, the spread of knowledge is a virtue. After all, the end goal of this student would have been to publish in a journal -- which people from any country can access.