Nature: Intensifying US dispute threatens science ties with China

The 20 October Nature reports that the Government Accountability Office has concluded that May meetings and a dinner between US and Chinese science officials “violated legislation banning scientific cooperation with China by NASA and by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).”

The article says that Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), who chairs a subcommittee that is important for science funding, “inserted the ban into a spending bill that was passed last spring,” and now, “backed by the GAO report ... has asked the US Department of Justice to rein in” China-related activities by John Holdren, the president’s science adviser and head of OSTP. Nature quotes a Wolf spokesman: “Congressman Wolf is deeply concerned by China’s spying and theft of technology and doesn’t think it is wise to give the Chinese access to advanced space technologies.”

Holdren reportedly asserts, with the backing of a justice department memo, “that he has the right to conduct diplomacy on behalf of US President Barack Obama, even without congressional approval.”

Nature also quotes a Chinese science policy expert: “This has potential to cut off collaboration with a country on a rapidly rising science and technology trajectory.” The article notes that “Chinese researchers are now more likely to collaborate and co-author papers with scientists from the United States than with those from any other country.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.