Excerpt from "NIH Investigating Researchers Who May Have Failed to Disclose Foreign Government Contributions," posted on Scientific American, August 23, 2018.
The National Institutes of Health is investigating roughly a half-dozen research institutions based on suspicions that researchers with federal grants failed to disclose significant financial contributions from foreign governments, Director Francis Collins said Thursday.
The fact-finding operation, Collins said, will center in many cases on technology research.
“We are concerned about circumstances where people have intentionally been deceptive about those connections, with an intention to divert intellectual property or perhaps use their access to peer-review materials to ship them overseas,” Collins told reporters after a Senate hearing.
On Wednesday, Collins also wrote to roughly 10,000 NIH grant institutions encouraging them to set up briefings with FBI field offices about threats to intellectual property and foreign interference. The topic has been a focus for the FBI, Collins said, and the briefings would serve as an opportunity for select grant recipients—whose grants come with a level of security clearance—to hear about efforts to protect classified scientific information.
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