UCSD Doctor Resigns After inewsource Raised Questions About His China Business Ties

Speaker 1: 00:00 A renowned ucs d eye doctor resigned last week after KPBS partner. I knew sourced, raised questions about his government and business ties to China. I knew source investigative reporter Brad Racino explains how this international issue is now surfacing in San Diego Speaker 2: 00:18 more than ever. The adversaries targets are a nation's assets. Our information and ideas, our innovation, our research and development, our technology that was FBI director Christopher Ray speaking in April and no country poses a broader, more severe intelligence collection threat in China. The FBI says some of China's government programs incentivize scientists to illegally take intellectual property developed at u s universities to China. The goal to advance China's scientific, economic and military interests. Speaker 3: 00:55 The thousand towns program is the one that is best known and may be the largest. Speaker 2: 00:59 Michael Lauer is a deputy director at the National Institutes of health, the largest funder of biomedical research in the world. As of June, the agency had notified more than 60 universities and medical institutions about possible undisclosed ties by researchers to foreign governments, including the thousand talents program. Those NIH letters have prompted grant refunds, terminations, suspensions, and FBI investigations. Well, new at MD Anderson Cancer Center fires three scientists accused of sharing important research and yes, Speaker 1: 01:33 data with China. It's for Chinese American professors at Emory university had been fired after failing to disclose financial and research ties to China while receiving federal, yes, Speaker 2: 01:43 more than a dozen members of the thousand talents program work at research institutions across San Diego. Among them was Dr Kong Jong, who until last week was the chief of eye genetics at UC San Diego's Shailee eye institute by scouring Chinese business filings, archived websites in mandarin along with property and divorce records. I knew source was able to uncover the following. John joined the thousand talents program in 2010 two years later, he founded a biotechnology company in China that specializes in the same work he performed at ucs, SD. Then he set up us subsidiaries, signed a $5 million licensing deal and patented inventions in a dozen countries. There's no evidence. Zhang has illegally shared intellectual property with China, but I knew source did discover he has not properly disclosed any of his more than half dozen Chinese businesses to UCFD or the national institutes of health as required by university policy and federal regulations. He also hasn't mentioned his role in the thousand talents program, Speaker 3: 02:47 not telling it is lying pure and simple and is unconscionable. Speaker 2: 02:54 Dr. Ross McKinney is the chief scientific officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges. The nonprofit has been educating officials at universities and hospitals to be alert to foreign efforts to recruit or influence their faculty. McKinney says universities were skeptical at first Speaker 3: 03:10 and only when they started getting into it and discovering that people were being dishonest. Did they go, oh, I actually think we have a real problem here. The, in this case, the NIH and the FBI are not exaggerating. There really is just a matic dishonesty. Speaker 2: 03:25 Critics say the u s crackdown on researchers is unwarranted. Michael Zigmund is an ethics expert and retired neurology professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He's lectured at China's Fudan University for more than 15 years and has colleagues in the u s who came from China, Speaker 3: 03:42 certainly country's spy on each other and the United States does its share of spying, but to, to, um, suggest that biomedical science is, is, uh, a target area for this kind of thing I think is, is crazy. Speaker 2: 04:00 Ucs d would not comment for this story other than to say Zang resigned Thursday. Sean's attorney said most if not all of his companies have been long known to the university, though he did not provide that evidence Speaker 1: 04:13 joining me or I knew source investigative reporters, Brad Racino and Joe Castillano. And welcome to you both. Thank you. Thanks. Now Brad. Dr Junge was also the subject of an earlier investigative report by I news source. Remind us about that. Speaker 4: 04:28 We had looked into him months ago for his research, uh, practices. This is part of our larger series on risky research. Uh, the systemic flaws in the oversight of human research, uh, across the U. S Zhang is a doctor and researcher at UC SD. And what we had found was that for a long time he had been performing research that had a lot of problems in it. We had found an audit that found that he'd been enrolling patients who were under age, that he wasn't keeping proper records, that he had actually heard somebody during one of his eye injections. And this kind of arose out of that. We were not looking into thousand talents at that point. This kind of came out organically from that research. Speaker 1: 05:07 Now, Brad, you were able to discover the doctor's background with a thousand talents and the company he set up in Shyna you, both you and Jill. So why wasn't UC San Diego able to discover that? Weren't they looking? Okay, Speaker 4: 05:20 that's a great question. Uh, there's a lot that we don't know about what is happening at UC San Diego. Zhang is being investigated, uh, and has been for a while now. And as a result, the university is not talking to us about anything related to that. Uh, one of the experts I talked to when I asked him that exact question of how, how could you CST, and I know he said, well maybe they don't speak Mandarin, which is actually a pretty good thing, uh, to, to point out because we, neither Jill nor I speak Mandarin, we use translator services online to find this stuff. But there's also thousands of researchers just at UC San Diego and they have a very small, it seems a very small compliance at that university. So either, you know, if these things are not being disclosed, um, who even knew to go looking for it. So we don't really know. So in light of this concern by U s authorities about foreign scientists, jail is UC San Diego tightening up its vetting policies? Speaker 5: 06:14 It's hard to say. Like Brad said, they are not talking to us. They're not telling us what they're discovering and their investigation and what they're planning to do. One thing that we just learned today actually is they are implementing a new program called the outside activity tracking system, which is supposed to help people file these disclosures, make them electronic and streamlined. This has been in progress for about a month now it seems like, and theoretically this should help prevent some of these kinds of problems in the future. Speaker 4: 06:45 Brad, if doctor John did disclose to the university he opened this eye research institute in China, would that be okay with ucs? D is that within its ethics guidelines? It's certainly common for researchers and scientists to have their own companies be affiliated with different universities and hospitals, both here in the u s and outside. The disclosure part of it that's really important is that they have to be invested primarily at the university that is paying their salaries. So while they may be allowed to do some work outside, the point of disclosing that is is so that the university can say, okay, you're spending too much time over here, you're doing too much work over here when we're paying your salary. So it may have been okay if he was spending, you know, five 10 20% of his time doing something else and properly disclosing it. But it seems from us, from our research that he was spending a lot of time in China. It was always over there and as CEO and founder of a multimillion dollar biopharmaceutical company, he was at think it's safe to say dedicating a large amount of his time and resources to that endeavor. So, and Jill, to the fundamental question you say, I knew source was not able to discover evidence that young illegally shared intellectual property with China, but wasn't that the goal of China's 1000 talents program? Speaker 5: 08:00 The Chinese government says the purpose of the program is to help advance the economic and scientific and military goals of the country. The accusation that American authorities are making is that it quietly incentivizes scientists to take intellectual property back from the u s to China because this program is supposed to recruit scientists back to China who are of Chinese descent. Usually now there are over 7,000 members. Nobody's claiming that every person in this program is illegally taking intellectual property to China, but the authorities are using this program to narrow in on people who may be committing those kinds of crimes. Speaker 4: 08:40 Jill, the doctor now has an attorney. What does his lawyer say in his defense? Speaker 5: 08:45 The lawyer says that there was nothing improper about his connection to the thousand talents program, Dr Song. And he says, you know, in there, there might have been some things that could have been done differently about doctor Zhang's disclosures that in the future he would do some things differently about what he would tell the university. Um, but that even if he had, there was nothing inherently wrong with him being involved in these Chinese companies. The other thing that he said to us is the reason that Dr John resigned is between the university and the doctor and not for us to know. Speaker 4: 09:19 Okay. Then well, between the allegations of unethical research practices and now undisclosed ties to the Chinese government. Brad, what kind of legal jeopardy is the doctor in? And what about Ucs d? Are they accountable? So we've, uh, as you know, we're not lawyers, so we can't really say exactly what, what is going to happen or what could happen. We do know what has happened around the country, uh, with similar cases. So there have been researcher scientists at, um, Los Alamos National Laboratory at Emory university, um, at National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and, uh, MD Anderson Cancer Center who have resigned or been fired or even arrested for this behavior. Um, but we don't know exactly what is going to happen to the doctor as far as ucs d is concerned. They actually are accountable as recipients of federal funding the NIH, which the National Institutes of health, which funded Zhang's work for more than a decade to the tune of more than $15 million. Um, they require that their recipient institutions like UC ESD actually collect these conflict of interest disclosures. It's part of a federal policy. So you CSD is on the hook here for at least explaining why they did not do that. I've been speaking with I new source reporters, Brad Racino and Jill Castalano. Thank you both very much. Thank you. Thanks. To learn more about doctors Young's business interests here and in China, go to [inaudible] dot org I new sources, an independently funded nonprofit partner of KPBS.