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A renowned UCSD eye doctor who is part of a Chinese recruitment program under FBI scrutiny has resigned amid inewsource’s questions about his foreign government affiliations and businesses.
inewsource has learned that Kang Zhang, the former chief of eye genetics at the UCSD Shiley Eye Institute, is a member of the Thousand Talents Program, which the FBI says incentivizes scientists to illegally take intellectual property developed at U.S. universities to China. The purpose, authorities say, is to advance the country’s “scientific, economic, and military development goals.”
Over the past few years U.S. intelligence agencies have grown increasingly concerned by foreign government efforts to influence and incentivize American researchers to take intellectual property abroad.
Authorities and universities across the country are beginning to crack down on academics they believe have participated in illicit or illegal actions.
Our reporting has also uncovered Zhang is the founder and primary shareholder of a publicly traded Chinese biotechnology company that specializes in the same work he performed at the University of California San Diego. He has not disclosed this and his other Chinese pharmaceutical businesses to the U.S. government or UCSD on forms required by university policy and federal regulations. Our reporting has not uncovered any accusation that Zhang illegally took intellectual property abroad.
Zhang resigned from the university Thursday after inewsource posed questions to his attorney and UCSD about the doctor’s connections to the Thousand Talents Program and undisclosed Chinese businesses.
This portrait of Zhang exists within Chinese business filings, archived websites in Mandarin, real estate documents and divorce records.
Zhang’s attorney, Leo Cunningham, told inewsource in an email on Tuesday his client “was never asked to conceal his involvement with the Thousand Talents program; he never did conceal his involvement; there was nothing improper about his involvement; and he had no reason to conceal his involvement.”
Dr. Kang Zhang was the chief of eye genetics at the University of California San Diego. (Credit: UCSD)
Most if not all of Zhang’s companies “have been long known” to the university, Cunningham said, though he provided no evidence. He said in an email Friday that Zhang’s reasons for resigning “are between the doctor and the University.”
Dr. Ross McKinney, the chief scientific officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges, said Zhang's lack of disclosures is troubling.
“Not telling it is lying, pure and simple, and is unconscionable,” said McKinney, adding “You have the exact paradigmatic case of what can and has gone wrong.”
After an inewsource investigation in April found Zhang put research participants in harm’s way for years, a UCSD spokeswoman said Zhang was “on leave” and the university was reviewing his activities.
They also wouldn’t say whether they received a letter from the National Institutes of Health recommending an investigation into Zhang, who has brought in more than $15 million in NIH grants over his career – about $10 million of it during his 11 years at UCSD – for research on eye disease and genetics.
As of June, the NIH's Office of Extramural Research had notified more than 60 universities and grantee institutions over concerns of undisclosed conflicts of interest and affiliations among researchers. The letters have prompted grant refunds, terminations, suspensions and FBI involvement.
“Those letters are sent out where we have concerns that there may be problems with noncompliance – noncompliance meaning that there was not proper disclosure of important information to us,” Michael Lauer, an NIH deputy director, told inewsource in June.
The NIH is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, investing around $39 billion annually. Lauer helps oversee its scientific integrity in research funding as well as grant compliance and public accountability. He said the agency has seen significant conflicts of interest where researchers who received NIH funding for their projects also have a financial stake in foreign companies developing the same technologies.
“In some cases, these are startup companies that they themselves founded,” Lauer said.
Dr. Michael Lauer, a deputy director for extramural research at the National Institutes of Health, is shown in this undated photo. (Credit: National Institutes of Health)
It is not illegal or uncommon for scientists to own businesses or be involved in talent recruitment programs. According to a recent study, nearly 1,000 government and private industry employees have taken Thousand Talents money. Cunningham said Zhang declined an offer to participate in the program full time and did not accept payment from the Chinese government.
inewsource has identified a dozen other members of the Thousand Talents Program at research institutions in San Diego but has not yet confirmed details about their activities.
Critics of the U.S. crackdown decry a new McCarthyism.
Michael Zigmond, an ethics expert and retired professor of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, is one of them. Zigmond lectured at China’s Fudan University for more than 15 years, has many colleagues in the U.S. who came from China, and believes this is all a “misdirected concern” — a way of targeting China that will backfire. Inevitably, he said, universities will lose students, researchers and funding, and patients will suffer.
“Certainly countries spy on each other, and the United States does its share of spying,” he said.
But the NIH and FBI have growing concerns.
In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray summarized the agency’s viewpoint to the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank.
“And no country poses a broader, more severe intelligence collection threat than China,” he said.
Kang Zhang was born near the start of China’s Cultural Revolution in 1963, a period when scientists and other intellectuals were condemned as capitalistic. Universities were shuttered, scientific training ceased and the brightest minds were sent to the countryside “to learn the value of political virtue.”
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To reverse the damage, China sent scientists to train and study overseas starting in the 1980s. Many didn’t return, so the party created talent recruitment programs to bring them back through financial incentives.
The most successful has been the Thousand Talents Program, which began in 2008. The goal was to return 2,000 high-quality academics to China over the next 10 years by offering competitive salaries, state-of-the-art facilities, honorary titles and a one-time payment of around $145,000.
It worked. Recruitment now exceeds 7,000 members.
Zhang was selected among the third batch of recruits in 2010, two years into his job at UCSD, where he was the founding director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine. After his recruitment, Chinese news releases and interviews involving Zhang often included his Thousand Talents affiliation.
A biomedical research facility on the UCSD School of Medicine campus is shown on May 1, 2019. (Brandon Quester/inewsource)
Around that time, Zhang created a pharmaceutical research and development company called CalCyte Therapeutics. San Diego philanthropist Richard Hertzberg helped fund the company shortly after its formation and later became its president.
CalCyte applied for and received two NIH small-business grants worth nearly half a million dollars to develop treatments for age-related macular degeneration – the leading cause of vision loss for those 50 and older and a primary focus of Zhang’s work.
In 2010, Hertzberg helped fund a conference in translational medicine in Shenzhen, China, in collaboration with UCSD and Peking University. Zhang was among the event’s three chairmen, and UCSD Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences Dr. David Brenner was one of the honored chairmen.
“That was the world at its best – knowledgeable people in conversation trying to help all of mankind,” Hertzberg told inewsource, “and that conference never would have happened without Kang Zhang and his hard work.
“I hope that we have not seen the last of that kind of conference,” he said.
Though CalCyte contracted with UCSD for its research, Zhang didn’t mention the company in his conflict of interest disclosures with UCSD’s Shiley Eye Institute. In fact, Shiley never collected disclosures from Zhang despite university and federal requirements.
The inside of the UCSD Biomedical Research Facility is shown in this undated photo. (Regents of the University of California)
On Tuesday, before Zhang resigned, his lawyer told inewsource Zhang has discussed disclosure expectations “at length” with UCSD.
In 2012, with CalCyte’s grant-funded work complete, Zhang founded the publicly traded Guangzhou Kangrui Biological Pharmaceutical Technology Co. in China – KangRui Bio for short – with a $1.5 million investment.
According to KangRui’s website, which was taken offline but archived, Zhang is the driving force behind the enterprise, honored by the Chinese minister of health as "the elite of our nation."
KangRui Bio’s 2017 semiannual report declared $11.7 million in assets, with Zhang owning 50% of the company’s shares.
The 2017 KangRui Bio semiannual report contains much of the information used to verify Dr. Zhang's Chinese business activities. You can download it by clicking on the photo.
Hertzberg told inewsource, “I have funded Dr. Zhang’s research work at UCSD for nearly a decade. I believe that as a doctor and genetic scientist, his research objective was always to advance science in the pursuit of knowledge to cure macular degeneration and other afflictions.”
An undated photo of the Shiley Eye Institute at the University of California San Diego campus in La Jolla. (UCSD)
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