Washington Foreign Press Center Briefing on Research Security.
Transcript
Good afternoon. My name is Jen McAndrew and I’m a media relations officer with the Washington for Press Center covering the East Asia and Pacific Affairs Portfolio. I want to welcome you today for this. On the record zoom Briefing on Research Security. Today’s briefers are Doctor Jodi Black, deputy director in the Office of Extra Mural Research at the National Institutes of Health, and Dr Rebecca Kaiser, chief of Research, Security Strategy and policy at the National Science Foundation. Together they will discuss how the n i, H and SFR ensuring the security of federally funded research while maintaining international cooperation. How the N. I H in NSF are helping US universities and the U. S. Research community adaption your threats, including foreign talent programs, and undo foreign government influence and how stakeholders across the U. S. Research in scientific community are working together towards solutions to address these new challenges. And now I will share some background on our briefers. Dr. Black has over 25 years of scientific research leadership experience with a background in basic and clinical science and program administration. She has managed multi disciplinary scientific programs in areas including infectious diseases, cancer in genomics, and has developed strategic alliances between academic, health care and commercial organizations. Dr. Black holds a PhD in pathology, and a master’s of medical science and infectious diseases from Emory University are other. Breather is refer is Dr Rebecca Kaiser. She is both the chief of research, security, strategy and policy and acting head of the Office of International Science and Engineering at the NSF. Her experience cover signs and technology policy agreements and cooperative efforts. Prior to the NSF, she held several strategy and policy positions with NASA. Dr. Kaiser also served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She earned a master of science from the London School of Economics and a PhD in international studies from University of South Carolina on behalf of the Washington Foreign Press. Enter weeks, then our sincere thanks to our two briefers for giving their time today on this timely topic and now for the ground rules, this briefing is on the record. We will post the transcript and video later today on our website, which is f p c dot state dot gov. If you publish the story as a result of this briefing, please share your story with us by sending an email to D C F P. C at ST backup. Couple of things to keep in mind. While using Zoom, we have muted all the participants. Please ensure that you have clicked on the participant list, hovered on your account and changed your account to reflect your name and your news outlet. This will help us during the question and answer portion of the briefing. Both Dr Black and Dr Kaiser will each give short opening remarks and then we will open it up for questions. If you have a question, please go to the chat box. There is a future there that allows you to virtually raise your hand. At that time, we willen you too, so that you can ask your question. And with that I will pass it over to Dr Black. Okay, I’m gonna share my screen and going to presentation. Married? I hope you can all see that. Okay, So I’m thank you for inviting me to talk to you today about research, security and combatting foreign influence from the n I h. Perspective. As that we noted earlier my slides are not advancing. There we go. I’m the deputy director of the Office of External Research at N I. H. And that is the office that’s responsible for oversight of all of our grants, policies and processes. Um, and I H is one of the largest biomedical funders in the world. This year budget is $41.6 billion.80 percent of that money goes right back out of an ih to fund extra mural research and scientists net both nationally and internationally. Our mission is science in pursuit of fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to extend healthy life and reduce illness and disability. And we know that in order to accomplish that mission in those goals, it requires international collaboration and international collaborative work. An N. I. H. Proudly supports international collaborations and foreign scientists who bring rich divers perspectives to the biomedical research enterprise. Last year we be provided 547 awards Teoh investigators who were working internationally, which told about $238 million. But we want to ensure that the investigators that we supports globally both nationally and globally, aligned with our values of integrity honesty, reciprocity, transparency and meritocracy. And as you can see from this little figure on the right that the work that is conducted internationally spans a variety of research topics, including immunology, HIV, infectious diseases, global health, population help. I mean, you can find more about the kinds of research that we support domestically and internationally. It black apologies with interruption. Yes, cannot see your slides. Can’t wait. We tried this earlier, but all right, well, let’s see what happens. You’re happy to provide them to participants afterwards. But if there is some button you can push will make that happen. Now it says it’s sharing the screen share. Now we’ve been math. Yes, we can. Thank you. OK, boy. Alright, How about now? Perfect. Okay, so everything I just said is on this slide. So take a look. A report dot n i h dot gov to see what n I H is supporting nationally and internationally. But we’ve run insistent problems and that some nations have exhibited increasingly sophisticated efforts to exploit influence and undermined our research activities and our environments. There’s been a breach of research ethics that includes things like failure to disclose information that we require about foreign funding about any other support. As a matter of that, this has led Teoh unapproved parallel foreign laboratories, laboratories being supported and affiliation and appointments outside of their primary employer. Here in the United States, we’ve seen conflicting financial interests, undisclosed research for foreign governments, and all this is being done on US agency time or with you, US agency funding. We’ve also seen diversions of intellectual property, breaches of contracts and confidentiality, and we’ve got some egregious examples of gaming of the pure review process. So for today, the focus of our discussion is is research integrity and what we mean by research integrity, which is what I described in that paragraph is not the usual plagiarism or data falsification. It’s this rising issue of the intent to expel trait mason ideas and information from the U. S. In a systematic and systemic manner that benefits of foreign government. So this is like this is what they mean by research integrity. It’s what we’re gonna be talking about today, and these activities that I’ve briefly described and we’ll describe in work detail in a second actually prevent the allocation of federal funding in the United States. in a fair manner that’s based on merits. So some of our key concerns it n i h. Some of the things that we’ve experienced is a failure to disclose substantial foreign resource is an N. I. H. We give grants to two institutions, not individuals. Three individual scientists are employed by the institutions that we fund, and we require those institutions to disclose to us all sources of other support because we don’t want to duplicate fund. Most of those institutions also have employment contracts with their employees that prohibits them from having additional employment without permission. But we have seen examples of US based employees who also have foreign employment arrangements and in many cases, Thea American institutions are unaware of these employments arrangements. So with these duplicate for foreign employment arrangements, we also see overlap and work that the N. I H is supporting also being supported by another organization, duplication of laboratories and basic over commitment. People who are employed by a US academic institution are considered to be 100% employee there. They’re also employed by a foreign institution for 50 to 100% of their time. That’s over 100% effort and that’s impossible. We’ve seen a failure to disclose significant foreign support, failure to disclose financial conflict of interest and failure to disclose patents that were developed based on US funded work. And this is a breach of N. I. H. Policy. We have policies that require our academic institutions who apply for grants to provide all all of their other support. So we don’t do book a fund to provide all information about financial conflicts of interest, which means if you formed a company or you’re receiving funding from another source, we want to make sure that you can maintain your objectivity and research. So we require that financial conflicts of interest disclosed and any part of our grand awards that are going to have their work done in a foreign country must also be disclosed, even if there’s no money that’s going to the foreign country for that work from the U. S. But if they’re contributing significantly to the work which will result in a publication, it needs to be disclosed because we often have to get State Department clearance for those collaborations, and that information can be found in this that you are l that’s listed on the slide. We’ve also seen some egregious examples of peer review violations are peer review process is supposed to be 100% confidential. All the application material and any of the discussions about the applications or confidential and N. I H has a policy and its GPS, the Grants policy statement that describes that requirement. All review meetings are closed to the public by regulation, and we ask our peer reviewers to A to sign confidentiality agreements that they will keep all information in the grand application and all discussions about the grant confidential under penalty of perjury. And it’s it’s against the law to lie to the government in the United States. So we’ve seen we’ve seen peer reviewers take entire grant applications out of the system and send them to investigators. Another country. Often the applications will be annotated with instructions to look on specific pages for for methods or additional materials that will help advance another scientists work that also represents as taking proprietary and prepublication information and nascent ideas out of the system and handing it to somebody that doesn’t belong to. We’ve also seen examples of agreements between pure reviewers to manipulate the scores of specific applicants to give him the better chance of receiving an award, which is also not allowed. So about a year or so ago. Subcommittee of the Senate on Investigations developed this report about threats to the U. S. Research enterprise on China’s talent recruitment plans. The talents program contracts have their members signed legally binding contracts with Chinese institutions. The contracts incentivize members toe lie on grant applications to set up shadow labs and in some cases, to transfer US scientists, intellectual capital and nascent ideas to the to China. Some of the contracts also require that that cannot be terminated without the government’s permission. And this isn’t a stark contrast to the values that we assume oral operating on this scientists. I want to show you an example of some of the text that we’ve seen in an actual contract. I blocked out the, um, the identifiers, but here it says Party A, which is the Chinese institution, employs Party B, which is usually US scientists as a professor in the 1000 Challenge program for five years, and Party B shall work full time on the premises. Meanwhile, they also have a job in the United States and the purpose of the employment period is to gradually move the U. S lab to China to build international cutting edge research. So this is not a clean recruitment cause. It happens over the period of five years, where individuals are going back and forth in the lab in the United States and gradually transitioning intellectual capital Teoh to China. And you can read more about this at that website on on the bottom of the page. So here are some of the things that we have seen in these foreign employment agreements as a summary. And just to be clear, these programs target very high level senior tenured professors. They have a lot of influence and knowledge about their field. Many of them are expatriots. All of them are U S citizens and must. But not all of them are Chinese. And so what we’ve seen as a result of these recruitment efforts is serious overlap in time commitment. Sometimes they’re required to work in country. In China, full time substantial funding for research is provided, including start up funds from China. They’re also provided with laboratories. Often they’re fully equipped and include personnel on their given signing bonuses, salaries, support and they’re already receiving salaries support from their American institution. Other incentives might include housing or childcare or a job for their spouse. And there’s clear deliverables spelled out in these contracts. The requirement to train Chinese postdocs in the American laboratories are is made very clear. There’s requirements to publish a several papers a year in a very high impact journals and to develop intellectual property and filed for patents. There’s instructions that the Chinese institution is to be the primary affiliation at all publications. There’s instructions to keep all of these arrangements and the work in China secret to slowly transition that lab from the US to China. And all this creates both conflicts of commitment because people are working over 100% effort and conflicts of interest. So basically, this all boils down to types of theft, its employees that theft because thes air not clean, legitimate recruitments when, and it’s wonderful to recruit of talents globally to come to your country and bring in new ideas and new ways of thinking. But most people, when they take a new job, they leave their old job. But these these employment arrangements, transition people over a five year period and including sometimes an entire US based research. Well, there’s they spend during this five years Excessive what time away from the U. S. Laboratory. And they’re working for a competing employer. During this time. This boils down to theft from the U. S. Public because all of our n I h funding is from our taxpayers. And if we’re not, we’re not making good funding decisions and a badge of funding duplicate awards if we are unaware of other sources of duplicate funding. It’s also a theft of data from from at grant applications from laboratory of computers that documents from laboratories Also, theft of know how and we’ve seen we’ve seen identical grant applications come into U to the N i H that were also submitted to a Chinese under. So what I have described here is undisclosed conflict of interest where there’s theft of proprietary information and transfer of intellectual capital or intellectual property that was created with US taxpayer funds on and and um also undisclosed financial conflict of interests where often companies were formed around this new I P, where royalties are collected in China instead of after the US institution that supported the initial part of the work. And there’s also a effective economic development because the companies are providing economic development, China, instead of in the United States, and I’ve talked about some of the breaches in peer review and the theft of nascent ideas. Some of our cases have been led to outcomes that have been put into the news media. There was one case of an investigator at Harvard and Boston who lied to the Defense Department about their relationship with funding from the Chinese government and again, lying to the government is that is a crime in the United States that the lower left. There’s an example of an institution in Michigan that returned $5.5 million to the federal government because of tied because of duplicate funding and duplicate salary support from Chinese unders. The Moffitt Cancer Center fired its CEO and several other investigators because of their ties to Chinese offending and an ex Emery scientist who was out of the country for roughly 60% of 2015 um was charged with defrauding the US government for lying about ties to, uh to China. So um so currently we’re working with about 190 scientists. They’re not all ethnically Chinese, but most of them are. And of those 1 91 154 have been confirmed to violate at least one and I H policy. Now this is a very small percentage of the overall number of investigators that we support. But this very small percentages is creating harm in the fat and the scientific integrity and ethics fabric, and it normalizes this behavior in a way that’s that’s inappropriate. So we need to make sure that we stop it. These individuals are located about 87 institutions across many fields of biomedicine all over the United States. I’ve given you some examples of case outcomes that have resulted its civil, criminal and compliance penalties, and we have been working very closely with other federal organizations and with our academic institutions that we fund about an awareness campaign. We’ve been doing a lot of institutional outrage in helping them with their outreach. Many of the institutions we support have developed policy clarifications and training programs to make sure their investigators understand what other support is and are really stressing a focus on transparency. They’re they’re encouraging, strongly encouraging their investigators to disclose all of their relationships, even if they’re not sure if they’re important to disclose. And this has led many of the institutions that we are supporting to voluntarily disclosed problems that they’re now finding with some relationships with their US scientists and other organizations like a You and a PL. You work directly with our academic institutions across the country are getting together to help develop and share best practices for research. Security on a good example of a federal wide effort can be seen in this, a recent release of these slides on enhancing the security integrity of America’s research enterprise, which reviews some of the experience across many federal agencies that they’re surprised some good examples off some of those experiences and contract late language. It helps us understand, you know, research integrity and ways to improve mitigating these risks while maintaining the openness of the scientific environment that we need to move scientific fields forward and improve the health of all Americans and improve the health globally of all people. And so with that, I want to thank you for allowing me to talk to you about some of the n i h. Experience. And I just want to point out that the work I presented is the work of many, many people across many organizations, including law enforcement, non federal organizations, the State Department, the White House and dozens and dozens of vice presidents for research and other institutional and compliance and integrity leaders at the academic institutions that we support. And with that, I will stop there and stop sharing my screen. Thank you very much, Dr Black, for that very comprehensive overview, I will now turn it over to Dr Rebecca Kaiser from the NSF for her presentation. Thank you very much. And thank you, Dr Black Doctor Black and I work very closely together on these issues. Actually said on her last slide, This really is a partnership where we work together. Teoh identify what the concerns are and then develop approaches to resolve. That was insurance. I wanted to start with a slide on international collaboration because, as Dr Black said, our concerns are about breaches to research integrity and that is very different from collaboration. We support partnership. We support the transparent exchange of information and knowledge. Ah, working together and sharing the results of that knowledge and network together with our international partners. And you can see here some of the data that this is number of projects that we funded just in fiscal year 2019 come with the top 25 partner countries, and China is one of our strongest partners. An example of a collaborative program that we have with the Natural Sciences Foundation of China is the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases. We partner with N I H on this program as well, because, of course, we want to work together to understand and help solve the world’s problems. However, we have some risks, and this is in the area of research integrity. I won’t spend a lot of time going through this because Dr Black we have the same concerns. Conflicts of interest in commitment, the confidentiality of the merit review process and making sure that data before it is published is protected. Once it’s published, it should be made open and widely disseminated, but not before, so we want to make sure, of course, that we maintain collaborations. First and foremost, they are essential when we collaborate. We all need to work from the same principles and these are the principles of transparency, openness and competition and reciprocity. When we don’t have those, then we run into challenges and these breaches to research integrity. So we want to make sure that we balance our open environment to make sure we keep it open. We want data that are produced to be given as widely as possible to many researchers around the world. To protect that system, we need to focus on these signs and security issues as well, something we’re working on it. NSF is to better understand the scale and scope of these issues. I’ll give you some data, but we think we’re only at the beginning of our understanding because so much of this is in the area of information that has not been disclosed to us. That should have been disclosed to us. It’s hard for us to to to get at what the rial scope of the issue is. However, we know it’s out there and we’re working with our NH colleagues who have done a spectacular job at identifying more and more of what the issues are and the scale of those issues and then, of course, we want toe mitigate risks and share knowledge. So, as Dr Black said, there is a real scope of breaches to research integrity. Some of these breaches do fall in the realm of being illegal, um, and are prosecuted by Department of Justice. Some are civil issues and their civil lawsuits again by the Department of Justice. There are also issues that are Inspector General, which is independent from NSF. They find that may or may not go into the realm of being illegal, but are such concerning compliance breaches such a concerning misuse of US federal funds that they recommend actions to NSF to take. So far, we have taken about 25 at such actions when we have found egregious behavior that has become has been because of improper foreign influence. The behavior itself, however, is, um, duplication of NSF grants and a foreign grant. It is, um, overlap of time, which, as Dr Black said, is theft of time, where they’re supposed to be working on an NSF grant. But they’re working on other things and didn’t disclose it to us using NSF funding for an international project when they should not have been doing that and didn’t disclose that tow us. Those were just some of the examples of the types of things that we’ve seen, and so far we’ve had $4.6 million returned to us because of these actions, and we’ve taken 25 of them. We have 16 institutions of higher education or small businesses that we’ve found involved and 15 researchers. We, um when we find this out, we can suspend an award. We can terminate the award, and we also candy bar the researcher from serving as a reviewer, Panelist or consultant. When the case is air very, very egregious against an institution itself. There is the possibility of D barring that institution as well, and these can be government wide suspensions and departments. So in response to these concerns that we found were taking actions to make sure that we have the best use of federal funds since I showed on the previous slide, we also created my new position as of March 2020 so that I can focus on policies to mitigate the risks. We’ve must also revised our policies on disclosure to make it as clear as possible to the community what we need to know. What other support information. We need to know what affiliations and appointments we need to understand. And the basic answer is that all of these sources of other support and all of these other affiliations appointments do need to be disclosed to us. But we give either even further clarifying language in our policy on that. We do have employment requirements for NSF employees and rotate ER’s at NSF that they cannot be members of the foreign talent recruitment programs that we find concerning because they are signing contracts that have the types of clauses doctor Black pointed to. And we do have mandatory signs and security training for our employees. I have a reference to the independent adviser study done by the Jason Group on. There is a reference to that on my last slide, where again they did say that these are real issues and that they can be put under the rubric of research integrity. Um, and of course, we want to make sure that we communicate this much asleep possible as we can, possibly with the community and with our international partners, and work very closely together with the other government partners so you’ll have the slides, so you’ll have the references, and I’m happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Dr Kaiser. We will now open it up to questions from our participants. Just a reminder to please go to the chat box and raise your hand. If you would like to ask a question, you can also type your question into the chat box if you have technical difficulties. Yes, I see a question from Pearl MTI bays. Newsday’s Zimbabwe Pearl. Go ahead. I’m high. Thank you very much. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay, um, thank you very much for doing this presentation. This is very alarming in from information that you’re sharing. Eso I’m very, uh I guess I’m I’m I’m still trying to absorb everything that you just said. I’m hoping that we can have these presentations so that we can refer to them as we write our articles to make sure that we are accurate in our reporting. Have a couple questions for you. How was this first discovered? So can you share a little bit about case zero, if you will on. But have you seen this happening anywhere else in the world? How about say, in Africa, South Africa Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda was involved. I mentioned some, uh, countries there because there is some research that they do. And they have increasingly now the ties with China in Africa. So I want to find out if you see anything in that realm. And, um, is this a fresh innovation by China? Is this Russian influenced? I mean, how did China initiate this new strategy, if you will? What’s the driver off? This Chinese research transfers strategy and isn’t Russian influenced. Thank you very much. Jodi, do you want to start with case zero? Cause you were much You’re ahead of the curve. You’re So we were informed by law enforcement that we had a problem in our peer review system. And that’s how we learned about the strategy to manipulate purity scores and remove grant applications from the peer review system to benefit others. And that’s sort of blossomed into, um, many more undisclosed pieces of information about foreign funding for an affiliations, mostly from law enforcement, so that they handed us a bunch of cases. If you will to investigate on dykan tell you when they first told us we had a problem, we didn’t believe them because scientists don’t behave like that. But, um and so most scientists and I want to stress this. Most scientists from anywhere, including China, do not behave like that. OK, but these thes ah, this program, the talents program, is 10 years old, and it was it was created to recruit talent. I mean, that is a legitimate need. The United States does that. Every country does that, and it’s it’s supportable, and it’s useful and necessary to, you know, to transition ideas and new ways of doing things. It helps move the entire world forward. But it’s the way this program is set up is to keep too much information secret. There’s too many clauses in the contract with requirements that don’t allow transparency on, and that’s a require transitioning of information. It’s it’s It’s intended to transition intellectual capital from another country into China, and you ask if we’re aware of whether this is happening in countries in Africa way. We believe this is happening everywhere, that the United States is a big target because we have a lot of infrastructure for research. But anywhere there is infrastructure for research is that there’s a risk I agree with Dr Black. Um and we at NSF became aware of the issues as well, from law enforcement and from our inspector general. Ah, bit later than an ih It was around the beginning of 2018 and of course, we also were very concerned because we’re in basic research. It’s made open. We can understand how these could be issues, but we do did certainly find things out. As I said, um, we believe that there was a significant shift when the programs that Dr Black was talking about ah changed a bit. So the programs are about 10 years old and starting around 2016 they shifted into allowing scientists to spend part of their time in the United States and part of their time, usually in China. Most of these programs are in China, and at that time I think there was a raise arised in concern because that allowed the researchers to basically have to employers. And many of these that were dealing with did not disclose their second employer to their US institution. And we’re also, um, spending time at the international institution without also disclosing that to us or the U. S. Institutions so that was definitely a shifting point. Okay, I would like to couple on you boot from Cigna. Next for your question. Oh, hello. Can you hear me? We can Oh, thank you. This is for you from sign on news. Hello? Um, yes. Hi. Um, so I don’t with some questions. So, um, among all those, um ah, scholars that you investigated investigated how many off them, actually. And they were actually intentionally hiding? No, Tice was China. Teoh, you or most is my most of them. Are they? Most of most of 10. Just they don’t They’re not aware off the situation. Um, also their actual case where you find the illegal transfer off technology or knowledge to China other than just not disclose not disclosing their, um, fundings with China. And I also want to know if you how would you respond to some of the criticism? Quit? Isn’t off these this? They call it, Heard they work. They were criticized this as a political removed action. And, uh, it could also be in complex with with some of the some of the spirit, the spirit off university. It’s for on for academic freedom and on racial justice. So if you can answer those questions. Thank you. You’re Do you want me to start Rebecca? Sure, sure, Go ahead. So I’ll start. I think your first question was, how do we know whether people were just unaware requirements to disclose versus outright lying? And I can tell you that most of our cases they initially lied about when they were confronted. Are you doing this? The answer was, you know, s O Many of us of the of our cases started with a lie and been the examples I showed you of cases that were in the news. Charles Lieber, Allied. Theo Emery. Employees live. They lied about their relationships. They just got caught lying. Eso um we worried that people were unaware, which is why we’re working closely with with NSF and other academic institutions to help raise awareness to help make sure people understand there were the requirements to disclose other support. That the problem is, is when we don’t know where other funding is coming from. We fund the same work, and that’s not fair because we live in a very hyper competitive funding environment in the United States. We get 80,000 grant applications a year and I H R success rate is about 20%. So we don’t want to duplicate fund. We could give that to another scientist instead, so that is a big problem. What we deal with is closer to the earlier stages, the more basic side of science. Just like Rebecca does. My doctor Kaiser, most of our work is in that area, so it’s pre patent protection. It is not illegal to transition that, but the problem is the company. The the technologies are patented in China, but their work, the Oradour origin, was supported by U. S. Taxpayer. Funding in our model for economic development in this country is to use our engines of innovation, which are academic institutions, to make discoveries, spend them out into companies, create things that are good for the public and create economic development and hire people. So an entire model is broken when those early stage technologies are transferred to another country without her knowledge. Onda, we are not at all intending to be to racially profile. The only thing we care about is whether or not we’re making good funding decisions. And we know we cannot do that if we don’t understand all sources of support. And so that is our main concern. That’s right. We select our research projects at NSF based on two principles only the intellectual merit of the project and the broader impact of the research. Is it going to have great impact? That’s it. We don’t pay attention to any other factors when we select the challenges. We can’t make those good selection decisions if something is skewed in the project, because that intellectual merit is based on ideas from someone else and not from that particular person, where if we are not confident that that person is truly, they truly do have the capacity to perform the grant because they might be spending several months a year doing something else and they’re not telling us. We can only select 20% of all the proposals that are given to us to fund. And it’s just not fair to select one of those projects that is sent to us when there’s conflicts of interest or conflicts of commitment that we have not been aware of and that takes money away from another researcher who is playing by the rules. Thank you. I will now call on Alex from the Toronto News Agency. Yes. Thank you, Jen. Alexa, follow Chinese lead just opposite the doctor back. And Kaiser, thank you for being here on. I’m sharing our findings. It is alarming in this I activists peril just so we understand the elephant in the room, as they say. Are we blaming our own institutions or for entities in terms off his closure? You know, sometimes in the countries like Azerbaijan for foreign audiences, it’s hard to explain where the legal and in this kind of cases like it comes to foreign influence where the illegal behavior starts. You know, we have countries such as Azerbaijan, Russia. They are able to hire scientists, you know, in this town just to make sure their voices in the costumes. But then you’ll see it off. Scientists are going out and attacking US institutions, including State Department, religious body, etcetera. So that’s why it will help you explain us where the legal year ends and also who is to by in this case. And my second question is about pandemic has pandemic affected this intersection say, between money size, perhaps politics. Thank you very much. Sure. I could go ahead and start in on that one. Um and so who is to blame? Um, I think it’s always very challenging. Of course, when we look at cause ality and blame. What we can say is that many of these researchers who do these breaches, as Dr Black has said they have given full statements right intentionally have given false statements and have intentionally misused federal funding. The cause, often for them to do this seems to be that they signed thes talent recruitment contracts that have very stringent requirements. Ah, lot of pressure. Ah, lot of pressure to to publish in high level journey journals at a certain amount, a lot of pressure to recruit others, a lot of pressure to to make sure that that those ideas are the property of that international institution. So that contract has been developed by the foreign government. So they’re to blame for those contracts. The researchers are signing them, and there is a lot of intentionality there in what they’re doing and miss using federal funds. Um, so I think it’s it’s hard to understand, but, you know, and we don’t really again because we deal with scientists, you know, and the majority of scientists Don’t don’t act that way. So we we don’t know assed faras us institutions. I think U S institutions are doing a very good job at understanding the issues we’ve been working together and an area which has been working together with the institutions that we understand these problems more when they find out the institutions that their employees have signed a contract with someone else. Certainly most of them are concerned as well. They didn’t know they’re putting in better processes for disclosure themselves and to identify conflicts. And so, you know, I think we focus on mitigating the risk rather than completely on blame. That black. You want to say anything? Edition. Now I think you’ve covered all of it. Yeah. Did it would be a great and inside the pandemic unt effect. Ah, Pandemic. Yes, thank you. Um, I think like all of us were extremely concerned about the impact of the pandemic on international collaboration overall, because that collaboration is more challenging. We can’t really say if there has been any impact of the pandemic on these issues themselves. Um and I do want Teoh emphasize that these research integrity issues are often of while we’re focusing on those who are at US institutions right who are funded because the NSF funding in the united funding goes to the US institution and their employees air causing these problems within the United States. Um And so given that there, you know, we can’t really say if there’s any impact on the pandemic that we did want emphasize that this is those who are in the United States who are costing the issues. Okay, I would like to call on Olivia from cake. Sudden necks? Yeah. Uh huh. There’s so I among muted. Right? Yes. Thank you so much for doing this grey faint. And I have a questions. Or about I think Dr Black, national lecturer, about 190 Santis Which majority are trying days and not all of them. I wonder, Can you, like, specify? Like, what are you know how many are Chinese and know how many are other ethnicities? And also, I wonder, how does the situation insolence your augmented ations supposed in that age And NSF, the corporation was tryingto also specifically thick way to Dr Black. How does this influence the Vaccine Development Corporation on Kobe 19 was China Thanks. So, um so, I’ll tell you that about 93% of the cases that we’re currently aware of our ethnically Chinese and the rest are something else. But they’re all U S citizens, so that that’s an important point. ASUs. Far as what was your second question? I’m sorry, I don’t remember that. One second is, you know, the current, uh, about the research. Security. How that this insolence, our current vaccine development. Uncle Minute running? Very. So I will tell you that, um, the the State Department has has reissued our science and technology agreement are cooperative agreement with China on behalf of the United States. So we recognize that was a very important relationship to advance signs. So I just want to stress that as a zoo, a foundational point. The n i H also has been conducting work with the National Science Foundation of China. For over 10 years, we’ve been doing basic research studies collaboratively where we agree on a research topic, and we fund the American investigators in China funds the Chinese investigators, but they worked together on a single topic that both countries agree is an important problem to solve. And so We have our own agreements with charm for specific research projects, as’s faras a vaccine development goes from that is a global effort. It’s going to take the intellectual capital from around the entire country. If you’re following the news, you know that strategies for vaccines there’s many disparate strategies. Many of them will work. Some of them will work together. But they’re coming from all over the world. And there’s global clinical trials that are being conducted, and that is a requirement in order to have to be able to test enough people in the briefest amount of time to get a reasonable outcome to, ah to ascertain whether or not the vaccine is both safe and effective. So, um, I I see this. Ah, the vaccine effort is a global effort, just like the therapeutics efforts. Veteran development are also global efforts, strategies originating from all over the old. Yeah, I understand, like global, just wondering. Like it There, the scientists on both sides were talking with each other all research. It’s like my understanding that this is a global conversation, a global effort. Okay, I will now take a question that’s been submitted via the chat box from in KH, Japan. The question as written is Do you have any cases that were permitted and seen as normal activities before but are regarded as violating regulation and law? Now, how do you think the impact of the U. S. China strategic competition on the scientific cooperation that’s from in kh Japan. So so I can start again and we have everything that we are seeing and deny It, of course, is seeing even more has always been wrong. There’s nothing that has changed these air always things that have not been OK. Um and I think there’s a NA article in Nature Journal that was just issued, Um, where Dr Rita call? Well, whose former director of NSF said she was so surprised because she she could not believe that this was happening because this has never been OK. Um, and I think the U. S China strategic competition for for us at funding agencies of science were we don’t focus on the competition. We focus on funding the best science and making sure that the research system is the best it could be and as unbiased as it could be. And so competition really doesn’t have anything to do with that for us. Okay, I have a question from Jodi with the South China Morning Post. Hong Kong. Jodi, can you go ahead? Hi. Can you hear me? Yes. Hi. Thanks for doing this. Briefing is really interesting. And it’s on topic. So my question is about operation warp speed. Couple weeks ago, General Gustav Berna, which was President Trump’s point person to help lead the operation on a hearing confirmation hearing, said that he ruled out of the possibility of working with China on research on Kobe 19 vaccines. So now I understand that Congress has allocated 10 billion of US dollars to support this initiative. Jodi, I’m tryingto understand the the part of the funding that n i h has in the 10 billion, if any in the house that going to affect the family going into different countries for this effort. So n I h has been allocated a small portion of that funding to to help us support vaccine development, mostly through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and through an initiative called Active a C T I. B, which you can Google and read about. But they’ve also been allocated funding to develop rapid diagnostic point of care capabilities to ensure that underrepresented minority populations in the United States have access to any therapeutics or to understand what the what the resistance is to be there participating and therapeutics development or taking a but taking therapeutics or vaccine. And we have also initiatives that are developing technologies that are at various points of maturity. So the money is distributed for those purposes not just vaccines, but also for therapeutics development, for detection, development and for understanding who will and will not participate in vaccine trials. And, um, in detection studies, especially in our underrepresented minority populations. So that’s what our contribution contribution to warp speed is. Okay, I think we’re coming to possibly our last question. And I do see that Pearl Matiba has a follow up. So I will turn it over to you. Pearl, thank you very much for taking before what question, Dr. Black? And after Keyser, I’m gonna address this question to both of you. Um, do you have a dollar amount off how much each of your institutions have lost, and on the known cases, what’s the chance of reclaiming the research transferred? Um and on the 190 individuals that you’re dealing with. Um, can you break that down? This aggravated Maybe by how many of how many institutions? Because I’m I’m guessing it’s 190 individuals, but they may You may have two or three from one. Christine. Just want to know how many academic institutions that constitutes. Thank you very much for N i. H. It was about 87 academic institutions and I can turn you so the n i. H has an advisory committee to the director that has a subcommittee working on our influence issues. And last month there was a meeting, and they’re slides that are available to the public. But in that slide set in that update report, um, that there were about 100 $64 million currently in total, an active grants. Eso um But the total support of her scientist is ranges from individual grants was about $678,000 is the average that each that the grants were worth but ranged from 3 83 Teoh $1.2 million. But in total, it was about $164 million of active grants. Now, when you say lost, um that that take that’s a little more nuanced. So it’s not clear if all of that is lost, but that’s how much money we are talking about with inappropriate disclosures. Associate. Thank you. Sorry. The document that you mentioned is that available somewhere or yes, if you go to the n i h. Website and you look at our you just Google the advisory committee to the n I h director and look at the June 2020 meeting the documents available there. Thank you very much, Dr Yes. So I’m so far with the actions that NSF has taken thes suspension and termination of awards. It’s been 4.6 million thus far. We were a little later to these activities than an ih and our budget is about 1/4. That of n i h is budget. Um, we don’t know again what the multiplier effect iss. So that’s the amount that was returned as far as the amount of funding that may have been used in ways that we would be concerned about. Um, it’s hard to tell. And then, of course, we are saddened by those grant decisions that we made that were based on unfair information, you know, are inaccurate information or incomplete information. And so that amount of money that could have been given to other researchers is very hard to tell on. And I think that’s the amount that that were really very concerned about best. You $164 million could have gone to other investigators who were at risk of losing all funding. Yeah, that is something we all worry about. Thank you very much. Okay with that. Unfortunately, we have run out of time for additional questions, but I do want to express our appreciation. And thanks to Dr Black and Dr Rebecca Kaiser or this very useful, timely on important conversation about research security, we will make the slides available to all the participants. This briefing has been on the record, and a transcript and video will also be posted on our website. So that’s all for today. And thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you or bye bye.