Poached eggheads: China lures away 105 top American minds in bid to dominate med, tech fields

China is aggressively poaching America’s top scientists in its rabid quest for global dominance in fields like medicine, space and tech, with at least 105 of the best and brightest defecting to the communist nation since 2024, The Post has learned.

Nearly half of the recent wave of defectors over the last year is in biotechnology and medicine, according to a Post analysis, suggesting China is investing heavily to surpass the United States in medical innovation.

Other deserters specialize in critical fields like space science, climate change, computers and semiconductors.

They’ve all left US universities — or major corporations — to join what are in most cases Chinese Communist Party-funded institutions — lured by cash, with some like turncoat Harvard professor Charles Lieber promised a salary of $750,000 plus $150,000 in living expenses — and often their own sprawling research laboratories.

Some of the prize CCP acquisitions include :

• Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, who resurfaced last year as the founding director of a research institute in Shenzhen, where he will lead the race to develop the world’s first AI super-soldier. His new lab, based on his three decades of work at Harvard where he received at least $8 million in funding from the Department of Defense, is entirely bankrolled by the communist government. The Ivy League scientist was convicted in 2021 of lying to the feds about his ties to China.
• Zhonghua Gao, a leading brain development researcher who left Pennsylvania State University’s College of Medicine in January to join the newly established Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology, where he will recruit others. During his more than two decades in the US, Gao led multimillion-dollar research on autism and cancer development, funded by the National Institutes of Health.
• Renowned biologist Xianzhong Xu, who returned to China in May, a few months after four researchers in his lab at the University of Michigan were arrested for conspiring to smuggle biological material. Xu was not arrested with the others and there’s no evidence he was involved in that scheme.
• Virologist Haitao Hu, who left the University of Texas last December for the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Microbiology, where he will lead a team developing vaccines for major viral infections including HIV — mirroring the work he did for more than four years at Water Reed for the US Military.
• Omar Yaghi, who won last year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry for creating sponge-like materials that can trap water and gas and could be used to produce drinking water from desert air or capture carbon dioxide. Yaghi, 65, left the University of California Berkeley earlier this month for Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he is leading an institute that uses artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of new materials.
• Astrophysicist Liang Dai, who left Johns Hopkins University for Fudan University this spring. Dai, 38, who works hunting black holes, was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship for the “brightest young scientists” in 2021. Since the prize was established in 1995, 60 fellows have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.

“Both China and the United States recognize that the battlelines being drawn in the global war for scientific talent are critical for national security,” said Jack Burnham, senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ China Program.

“Beijing is increasingly betting that paralyzed federal science funding, concerns over immigration status for foreign workers and students at US universities, and its own pool of increasingly cutting-edge researchers will give it an advantage over Washington to lure away the next generation of top researchers.”

China was second only to the US as the world’s largest pharmaceutical market last year. It has long tried to figure out how to replicate American ingenuity, desperate to close the gap on drug research and development. Since 2024, it leapfrogged the US in clinical trial volume.

“There’s more and more interest in what China has been developing. They’re doing heavy recruiting in the US, and there’s an interest among scientists in the US because they have so much more freedom to advance treatments in China as opposed to what we’ve been mired down in regulatory restrictions in this country,” Dr. Roberta Shapiro, professor at Columbia University Medical Center and chief medical officer at Crescel, told The Post.

The FBI has repeatedly warned Chinese talent programs are part of a broader push to obtain foreign technology and expertise to bolster China’s strategic and military ambitions.

“Time and time again, the Communist government of China has proven that it will use any means necessary to advance its interests at the expense of others,” FBI counterintelligence assistant director John Brown had told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“Beijing aims to acquire our technology — often in the early stages of development — as well as our expertise, to erode our competitive advantage and supplant the United States as a global superpower.”

Additional reporting by Nick Labbat