I'm John Datchee with Brennan Weikert.

His new book is Biohack, China's Race to Control Life.

The Thousand Talons Program, China's Field of Dreams, attracting the best talent in order to catch up and pass and defeat our rivals in the West.

The man's name is Charles Lieber, born 1959 in Philadelphia.

He's the chair of the Harvard Chemistry Department. He's world famous for working on nanoscience and nanotechnology. And it has revealed over these last years that Charles Lieber was approached and corrupted by elements of the People's Republic of China.

Brandon, what do we know about who approached the professor and why they approached him?

And what happened to the research?

Well, that's an excellent question.

And so, of course, Lieber denies all of this, and, you know, he says that this is all a misunderstanding.

But ultimately, we know from the FBI investigation that was conducted into his issue,

here was a top, not just Harvard scientists, the head of

their chemistry department, touched everybody, you know, with his research, but he was also a senior

nanotechnology researcher for DARPA, which is our highly sophisticated elite military research

group. He was working for years for DARPA, had exclusive contracts with them.

He was approached at some point in the 2010s by representatives of the Thousand Talents Program

in China saying, hey, look, we'll pay you $50,000.

I believe it was a month or a week, to come open up nanotechnology labs in

Wuhan at the Wuhan Institute of Technology and to basically sort of mirror whatever research

you're doing at Harvard and DARPA mirror it here. And that way you'll augment the speed at which

you can achieve whatever great innovations you want.

And of course, as somebody like Lieber, that was very enticing.

Of course, he was having to partner with the Chinese military to do this.

...