MIT Resignation Warns of Chinese Interest in Using Western Research for Biowarfare By Sarah Lee for Red State
A former board member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) McGovern Institute for Brain Research has resigned her position and written an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal offering revealing thoughts on, not just how American and other western universities have been working with China on scientific advancements, but also how these institutions shut down criticism of concerns over these partnerships, possibly even offering insights into how COVID-19 was unleashed upon the world.
Michelle Bethel, stepdaughter of the Institute’s namesake, said she had long felt uneasy with the partnership between MIT’s brain study institute and the Chinese government after she witnessed changes in the Asian nation following her seven years living there beginning in 2006.
I have real affection for China and its people. I moved to Shanghai with my husband in 2006. Over the next seven years, I gave birth to three children there and learned the culture as well as the language.
But times have changed. The Communist Party has reasserted itself in every aspect of China’s society—economic, social, cultural and, yes, scientific. Yet MIT and the McGovern Institute seem to have failed to scrutinize these developments. I believe that MIT doesn’t have a firm grasp on events in China or on the risks of partnerships with Chinese institutions in cutting-edge areas of science that are subject to misappropriation or abuse for military modernization or repression.
After reading a report in Reuters about a Danish partnership with China, and recalling that the Chinese military had “published articles declaring biology a new domain of warfare,” Bethel took her concerns to other board members. Their responses? Those kinds of concerns might be perceived as “racist” and that objections to working with China ran counter to the idea that “scientific progress is paramount.”
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