Table of Contents

Overview

Deletion from DOJ China Initiative Online Report

2021/09/15 Washington Post Report

Cleveland Clinic Foundation Held Accountable in 2024

Links and References

Overview

On May 14, 2020, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the arrest of Dr. Qing Wang as a former Cleveland Clinic employee and a Chinese “Thousand Talents” participant.  The case was listed under the China Initiative.  

Dr. Wang was charged with false claims and wire fraud related to more than $3.6 million in grant funding that he and his research group received from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Cleveland Clinic fired Dr. Wang the same day he was arrested.

Dr. Wang was born in China, began his work at the Cleveland Clinic in 1997 and became a U.S. citizen in 2005.  He specialized in breakthroughs in heart disease at the Lerner Institute of the Cleveland Clinic—one of the world’s leading research centers.

On July 15, 2021, DOJ moved to dismiss its case against Dr. Qing Wang. In a statement, the DOJ explained, "The United States Attorney’s Office moved to dismiss the complaint, without prejudice, against Qing Wang, a.k.a. Kenneth Wang. The Office has made this decision after a review of the case and will decline further comment at this time."

The Cleveland Clinic also released a statement saying, “We have fully cooperated with federal law enforcement’s investigation into this matter. Dr. Wang’s employment was terminated following an internal review which revealed violations of Cleveland Clinic and National Institutes of Health (NIH) policies.”

​On July 20, 2021, U.S. Magistrate Judge William H. Baughman, Jr. ordered the dismissal of Dr. Wang’s case. 

After DOJ made the motion to dismiss Dr. Wang’s case, it proceeded to delete it from its online report on the China Initiative – a practice that was continued unannounced and without explanation for several months until November 2021 when APA Justice reported it to the Attorney General and MIT Technology Review began to build a database on the online report. 

On September 15, 2021, the Washington Post published an interview with Dr. Wang, who later restarted his research career at China’s Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

On June 21, 2024, Science reported that DOJ reached a settlement with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF), requiring CCF to pay $7.6 million to resolve allegations of mismanagement involving three NIH grants. 

This settlement sends a clear message that research institutions will be held accountable for failing to adequately monitor outside support provided to their faculty.

Defense attorney for Dr. Wang maintained that his client had followed the rules and voluntarily disclosed his Chinese support. “He told them everything—both NIH and CCF.” The CCF settlement, he added, simply confirmed Dr. Wang’s innocence.

Deletion from DOJ China Initiative Online Report 

The Department of Justice (DOJ) maintained an online report on China Initiative cases since the initiative's launch in November 2018, including Dr. Qing Wang's case. 

However, after the DOJ moved to dismiss Dr. Wang’s case, DOJ deleted his case from the online report. This unannounced practice of removing dismissed or acquitted cases continued for several months without explanation. 

On November 24, 2021, APA Justice reported the removal of about 20 cases from its online China Initiative report to Attorney General Merrick Garland.  MIT Technology Review brought this practice to light with a published investigative report on December 2, 2021.

DOJ ceased to update its online report on November 19, 2021.  The end of the China Initiative was formally announced on February 23, 2022.

2021/09/15 Washington Post Report

​According to the Washington Post on September 15, 2021, in the weeks leading up to his arrest, Dr. Qing Wang was interviewed by the Cleveland Clinic and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) about his grants. He got no indication he was under criminal suspicion.

“I was shocked,” he said about his early morning arrest in May 2020. “At that moment,” he said, “I felt that my life was over.”

Dr. Wang was the lead investigator on a research project on the genetics of cardiovascular disease, funded by more than $3.6 million in NIH grants.

He allegedly neglected to disclose to NIH that even as he was a professor at Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner College of Medicine, he was a beneficiary of the Thousand Talents Program, through which the Chinese government recruits academics in the West whose expertise might benefit Beijing.

In an affidavit, FBI agent John Matthews alleged that through the program, Dr. Wang was made dean of the College of Life Sciences at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. The agent said Wang concealed receiving Chinese government grants totaling $480,000 for research that overlapped with his U.S.-funded work. In particular, Matthews alleged, citing NIH information, “the families used in both studies were mostly the same.”

Dr. Wang’s lawyer, Peter Zeidenberg, disputed the allegations, saying Wang disclosed his research in China as part of the NIH application and did not use American families for the Chinese study. Dr. Wang also disclosed to the Cleveland Clinic that he was affiliated with the talent program, said Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor and a partner at Arent Fox in Washington.

“Ultimately this came down to whether the grant forms were filled out correctly,” Zeidenberg said. “The information was all there. It just wasn’t where the NIH was looking.”

Over 34 years of research in the United States, including 21 at the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Wang led a team that discovered the first gene for Brugada syndrome, a disorder causing irregular heart rhythm, which can be fatal — especially in young people.

He wanted to stay in the United States because it “has the best environment for science in this area,” and because he thought he would have the most impact in a country where heart disease is the leading cause of death.

The arrest terrified Dr. Wang, his wife, Qiuyun Chen, and their two daughters.

“We worked so hard day and night just trying to understand how to prevent human disease,” said Chen, who also came to the United States in 1986 to study and was a member of Dr. Wang’s Cleveland Clinic research team. “And you never think this would be criminal.”

Cleveland Clinic Foundation Held Accountable in 2024

According to a report by Science on June 21, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has signaled that research institutions will be held accountable for oversight failures.

In a settlement reached on May 17, 2024, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) agreed to pay $7.6 million to resolve allegations of mismanaging three National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants. As part of the settlement, a senior CCF administrator must personally attest to the accuracy of all NIH submissions, a significant responsibility.

The case began in 2018 when NIH investigated CCF cardiovascular geneticist Dr. Qing Wang, based on an FBI list of scientists allegedly receiving Chinese funding. Following a CCF investigation, NIH suspended Dr. Wang’s $2.8 million grant in April 2020, and CCF terminated his employment. 

Dr. Wang was arrested in May 2020 under the China Initiative but was later cleared when the DOJ dropped the charges in July 2021 without explanation. Dr. Wang’s lawyer maintained that Dr. Wang had disclosed all necessary information to NIH and CCF, asserting his client's innocence.

The CCF settlement follows earlier civil settlements with the Van Andel Institute, where scientists were not criminally charged, amounting to $6.6 million in 2019 and 2021.