As Wuhan Lab Investigation Heats Up, Brown Prof Makes Plea to U.S. to “Stop Harassing Scientists”

As Wuhan Lab Investigation Heats Up, Brown Prof Makes Plea to U.S. to “Stop Harassing Scientists”

A physics professor at Brown University in Providence made a public plea over the weekend to the United State government to “stop harassing scientists” during his comments in a national panel discussion. 

Brown’s Xinsheng Sean Ling spoke with GoLocal about what he has seen from both American and Chinese governments in recent years as it pertains to scientists conducting research — and the increasing reports that COVID-19 could have emerged from a lab in Wuhan. 

“The FBI has accused China of setting up the Thousand-Talent Plan to 'steal' American talents,” said Ling, who was born in Wuhan, China and is now a naturalized American citizen. 

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“The American Physical Society APS had a webinar [this weekend] to openly discuss why the U.S. government needs to stop harassing us,” said Ling, who has conducted research in both the U.S. and China. “I participated in the China program after I exhausted all possible U.S. funding.”

 

U.S. - China Collaboration in Focus 

“This is pretty big news in scientific circles,” said Ling. “What happened was over the last several years, there was a major push by the U.S. government to decouple U.S.and Chinese science collaboration, and this is something the APS is concerned about. This is what we did the webinar for."

Ling said APS’ members number around 6000 scientists across various physics departments, labs companies who assess policy for American physics. 

In 2012, Ling said he decided to participate in the Chinese Thousand Talent Plan when he exhausted researching funding options in the U.S. — and he had helped launch Nabsys in Providence. 

“It was purely to increase funding for my lab — here was no [money] after that my funding was not renewed,” said Ling. “So I applied to Chinas’s Thousand Talent Program. Bejing gave me a lucrative offer — I was tempted to resign from Brown in 2012, but my wife said she wouldn’t give up living in Rhode Island for it.”

Ling said was recruited to work part-time on his research at the Institute of Physics under the Thousand Talent program, and ultimately was offered a part-time position with Southeast University — and as part of his stay in China, one million [RMB] to start his company there, “Nanjing Rhode Island.” 

Soochow University also recruited Ling, who wanted him to bring notable American scientists to lecture; it was then that Ling said he began to see the disintegration of American-Chinese relations. 

“That’s when the U.S. government starting controlling American scientist integration with China - that’s when I saw they started arresting people closer to me, like Zhendong Cheng,” said Ling, who collaborated with Cheng while he was a postdoc at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.

“The U.S. government accused him of having a visiting appointment in China under NASA, and he was arrested in the U.S.”

“As the APS discussed [this weekend], the CEO of APS is [calling on the U.S] to release scientists,” said Ling, who compared the arrests of the scientists — and need for a call for their release — to actions taken by Iran. 

“The U.S. government is panicking [because] they believe China is a rising threat,” said Ling. “Our role [through APS] is to remind the U.S. government to keep its cool. The way to keep its edge is an open system and academic freedom and liberty.” 

 

Wuhan and COVID

"I truly appreciated my colleagues and bosses at Brown for not harassing me. I was able to write papers and be productive during the pandemic,” said Ling. 

“There are many issues regarding Coronavirus, number one, how did it get started. There are issues I hope the investigation [President Biden] ordered will tell us more where it came from. I feel with the vaccine, we are almost out of it — we’re very fortunate to show the American science technology at work.”

“The controls of the Chinese were probably less rigorous than in the U.S. I believe they could have done it [in the Wuhan lab] due to curiosity — whether that was the one that got out of the lab, we’ll see,” said Ling. 

“China is under Communist control — not everyone in the sciences are evil emperor doers,” said Ling. “I believe when China overcomes one regime control and joins the world of democracies, I hope it’s a peaceful one. As I told my Chinese colleagues, I’m a naturalized American — it’s what my Pledge of Allegiance says.”