An American scientist convicted of lying to U.S. authorities about payments from China while he was at Harvard University has rebuilt his research lab in Shenzhen 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 ALS and restoring movement in paralyzed patients. But it also has potential military applications: Scientists at China’s 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 U.S. Defense Department.
Lieber was found guilty by a jury and convicted in December 2021 of making false statements to 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 $50,000 and ordered to pay $33,600 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service. During the case, his defense said he was suffering from an incurable lymphoma, which was in remission, and he was fighting for his life.
Three years after he was sentenced, Reuters has learned that Lieber is now 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. “Personally, my own goals are to make Shenzhen a world leader.”
Lieber, through an assistant, declined an interview request, citing “current commitments.” He didn’t respond to written questions from Reuters.
SMART last year appointed Lieber as an investigator, according to a post on i-BRAIN’s website dated May 1, 2025. That news was covered by some media outlets. The same day, i-BRAIN said 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, the parent of Reuters news agency. 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 U.S. safeguards on technology with potential military uses haven’t kept pace with Chinese government efforts to acquire it. That concern is amplified because of Beijing’s military-civil fusion strategy, whereby civilian scientific resources and research are shared with the military.
“China has weaponized against us our own openness and our own efforts for innovation,” said Glenn Gerstell, a nonresident senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former general counsel of the U.S. 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 defense ministry didn’t respond to questions about China’s development of brain-computer interfaces. SMART and i-BRAIN also didn’t reply to requests for comment about their research and the recruitment of Lieber. (Reuters)