An American scientist convicted of lying to US authorities about payments from China while he was at Harvard University has rebuilt his research lab in Shenzhen, China, to pursue technology the Chinese government has identified as a national priority: embedding electronics into the human brain.
Charles Lieber, 67, is among the world’s leading researchers in brain-computer interfaces. The technology has shown promise in treating conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and restoring movement in paralyzed people.
It also has potential military applications: Scientists at the Chinese People’s Liberation Army have investigated brain interfaces as a way to engineer super soldiers by boosting mental agility and situational awareness, according to the US Department of Defense.
Photo: Reuters
Lieber was found guilty by a jury and convicted in December 2021 of making false statements to US federal investigators about his ties to a Chinese state program to recruit overseas talent and tax offenses related to payments he received from a Chinese university.
He served two days in prison and six months under house arrest, and was fined US$50,000 and ordered to pay US$33,600 in restitution to the US Internal Revenue Service.
During the case, his defense said he had an incurable lymphoma, which was in remission, and he was fighting for his life.
Three years after he was sentenced, Lieber is overseeing China’s state-funded i-BRAIN, or the Institute for Brain Research, Advanced Interfaces and Neurotechnologies, with access to dedicated nanofabrication equipment and primate research infrastructure unavailable to him at Harvard.
The lab is an arm of the Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation, or SMART.
“I arrived on April 28, 2025, with a dream and not much more, maybe a couple bags of clothes,” Lieber said of his move to China at a Shenzhen government conference in December last year. “Personally, my own goals are to make Shenzhen a world leader.”
Lieber, through an assistant, declined an interview request, citing “current commitments.”
He did not respond to written questions from reporters.
SMART last year appointed Lieber as an investigator, according to a post on i-BRAIN’s Web site dated May 1 last year.
The same day, i-BRAIN said that Lieber had also been appointed its founding director — an announcement that went unreported at the time.
In 2011, Lieber was named the world’s top chemist of the preceding decade in a set of scientific rankings published by Thomson Reuters.
Thomson Reuters, which in 2016 sold the business that compiled the rankings, declined to comment.
Some analysts say Lieber’s ability to reconstitute his laboratory after a federal criminal conviction for lying about his ties to China shows how US safeguards on technology with potential military uses have not kept pace with Chinese government efforts to acquire it.
“China has weaponized against us [the US] our own openness and our own efforts for innovation,” said Glenn Gerstell, a nonresident senior adviser at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and former general counsel of the US National Security Agency from 2015 to 2020. “They’ve flipped that and turned it around against us, and they’re taking advantage of it.”
The Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology and the Chinese Ministry of National Defense did not respond to questions about China’s development of brain-computer interfaces.
SMART and i-BRAIN also did not reply to requests for comment about their research and the recruitment of Lieber.
Domestic and international researchers are being recruited by i-BRAIN for electrophysiology studies on rhesus monkeys as models for human brain-computer interfaces, according to a September 2025 post on its Web site, which invites prospective applicants to contact Lieber.
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