Last week, the FBI put out a press release that drew minimal attention from The Associated Press and The New York Times, each of which filed stories on it because, you know, the FBI put out a press release. Neither story reflects much enthusiasm for the tale they tell.
It's a missed opportunity. What we have here is conspiracy, bribery, industrial espionage, and even an unnamed co-conspirator (identified as "CC-1" in the FBI's press release). This has the makings of a great story.
In its May 20th release, the FBI announced "the filing of charges against Yudong Zhu, Xing Yang, and Ye Li, three researchers who worked on improving MRI technology at a university in New York, New York, but who also had undisclosed affiliations with a Chinese company performing the same type of research." The "university in New York, New York" was New York University, which had a multimillion dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop improved MRI imaging.
The defendants were charged with commercial bribery for accepting payments from United Imaging Healthcare, a Chinese company, and from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, a government-supported research institute.
At the same time that they were working at NYU on a lavish federal grant, they were working on a similar project funded by the Chinese government, according to the FBI.
Tom Hays of the AP led his story with, "Three New York University researchers from China divulged results from a federally funded study to Chinese competitors in exchange for tuition, rent and other expenses, federal prosecutors said Monday." The story goes on to briefly recount the facts in the FBI release, and that's it. I don't know who Hays might have talked to, but there are no quotes in the story, except for a few short excerpts from the FBI release.
Benjamin Weiser might have taken his cue from the AP story when it came into the Times newsroom, because he doesn't get very excited about the story either. His lede: "It was, the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan said on Monday, 'a case of inviting and paying for foxes in the henhouse.'" That's from the FBI release, the line that was put in there so reporters would pluck it out and quote it. He goes on to say, "Three researchers at the New York University School of Medicine who specialized in magnetic resonance imaging technology had been working on research sponsored by a grant from the National Institutes of Health."
The story has now been around for a week, and I'm mystified as to why nobody has dug into this. Here's one question I'd like to see answered: Why is the U.S. government funding research that is so secret that the Chinese want to steal it? Isn't government research supposed to be public? Why were the National Institutes of Health and NYU keeping such valuable information secret?
Somebody at The New Yorker or Esquire or Vanity Fair is going to write a great piece about what's really going on here. It's a great piece of long-form journalism waiting to be written.
-Paul Raeburn
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