After USDA request, Indiana plant biologist locked out of lab by school

Source: Science

A faculty member at Indiana University (IU), who has sharply criticized the government’s recent prosecution of several Chinese scientists accused of smuggling biological materials into the United States, has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders.

IU plant microbiologist Roger Innes says the move Thursday evening is the latest instance of retaliation for a letter he wrote last fall on behalf of Yunqing Jian, a plant scientist postdoc at the University of Michigan who had pled guilty to smuggling biological material and making false statements. The letter to Jian’s attorney, intended to be used at her sentencing, argued that what the Chinese postdoc had transported was not dangerous, but she was still ultimately deported. Her conviction triggered an investigation of Youhuang Xiang, a Chinese postdoc in Innes’ lab, that led to Xiang also pleading guilty last month to smuggling loops of DNA known as plasmids. He was also deported.

Innes says he was told by IU lawyers that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which has oversight over import and export of plant-related biological material, ordered the school to “secure” his lab, which works on improving resistance to a fungus that damages wheat. In response, IU police arrived at the lab at 8 pm on 7 May, informed one person present that she had to leave, and changed the locks. Innes says he wasn’t notified ahead of time and has not entered the lab since then.

An email the next morning from IU’s vice president of research, Russ Mumper, to the biology department chair, Armind Moczek, explained that USDA had told the university the agency “will be engaging in activity in a laboratory” and the school then locked down six rooms. (Innes says he shares lab space with three other faculty members who have no known connection to USDA’s investigation.) “The overall lockout may take a week or multiple weeks, at this point nobody knows,” Moczek wrote to his departmental colleagues shortly after receiving Mumper’s email.

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Read more: https://www.science.org/content/article/after-usda-request-indiana-plant-biologist-locked-out-lab-school