Even if someone had spied them, roaming campus before dawn with Styrofoam cartons in hand, it's unlikely that Jiangyu Zhu and Kayoko Kimbara would have drawn a second look: Just two young Harvard University scientists scurrying home from an all-nighter in the lab.
But according to FBI agents who spent 18 months investigating the married couple, it wasn't hard work they had on their minds in December 1999 - it was theft.
Over the Christmas holidays on the mostly deserted campus, investigators allege, Zhu and Kimbara looted the laboratory, which was full of genes with "significant commercial potential." The genes, which the couple had helped discover and which Harvard was in the process of patenting, were thought to hold promise as new anti-rejection drugs for organ-transplant patients.
By the time their colleagues returned, Zhu and Kimbara had vanished, allegedly with more than $300,000 worth of biological and research materials. Harvard's genes, meanwhile, had been put on an airplane to Japan.
It sounds like something from a novel - and until recently the scenario would have seemed like fiction to most academic scientists. But as universities make more discoveries with commercial potential in fields from engineering to molecular biology, some experts believe that theft and economic espionage may become more common.
"This is something all universities are probably going to have to learn to live with," said Mark S. Frankel, director of the Scientific Freedom, Responsibility and Law Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.
Zhu and Kimbara are scheduled to appear in federal court in Boston this month on charges that they violated the Economic Espionage Act by stealing trade secrets from Harvard and transporting them across state lines. If convicted, the couple could be sentenced to 25 years in prison and fined as much as $750,000.
The case is just one of several recent tales of scientific theft on campus that have resulted in criminal charges.
In May, a University of California scientist was arrested when campus police raided his home and discovered 20 vials of experimental proteins and a plane ticket to China. His supervisors became suspicious of the 40- year-old Chinese-American man after the proteins went missing and he began to chirp about setting up a biotechnology company overseas.
Last year, a Japanese neuroscientist was indicted on charges that he swiped vials of DNA and other proprietary materials from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and took them home with him to Japan. The Japanese government is considering a U.S. request for extradition so he can be tried for allegedly violating the Economic Espionage Act.
'This is a business'
University administrators say they worry less about someone swiping genes or other potentially profitable discoveries than they do about terrorists stealing deadly bacteria, nuclear materials or other sensitive items from laboratories. Still, it's an issue that some experts say universities can't ignore.
"Ten or 15 years ago everybody used to think of universities as ivory towers," said Lawrence Sung, a specialist in intellectual property at the University of Maryland School of Law. Now, "people recognize this is a business."
In 2000, American universities and research institutions collected more than $1.2 billion in licensing fees, according to the latest survey from the Association of University Technology Managers. They announced 13,000 discoveries and filed 6,400 U.S. patent applications, 3,800 of which were approved.
The growing efforts to commercialize scientific discoveries made on campus have put some institutions in a quandary: how to balance traditions of academic openness and sharing with the desire to protect potentially lucrative discoveries.
Drug makers and other commercial researchers use a variety of legal and technological measures to safeguard their trade secrets. They conduct employee background checks and enforce strict rules about taking sensitive data or materials off the work site. Scientists must sign nondisclosure agreements about laboratory activities.
Research notebooks often have bar codes - similar to those on cereal boxes - to track their whereabouts. And some labs are secured with door locks that recognize a palm print. "That's foreign to the academic world," said Alvin Thompson of the American Society for Industrial Security.
Universities rarely conduct background checks on scientists. Some universities have adopted legal tools to try to prevent their scientists and other researchers who borrow materials from stealing discoveries. But most institutions have little more than locked doors to protect their valuables.
"You can secure microscopes and computers," said Thompson, who also heads security at the University of Maryland's College Park campus. "Intellectual property is a different story. Five or 10 years from now, we'll probably discover that most of the secrets have been stolen."
Graduate students take home data or materials all the time. And when they finish school or get a new job, schools often permit them to take their research even though the university owns it, says Lita Nelson, director of the technology licensing office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It crosses the line when someone tries to commercialize it," she said.
Few U.S. companies would want to risk being caught stealing a discovery or an invention from an institution, Nelson says. In one notorious case, biotech pioneer Genentech agreed in 1999 to pay the University of California at San Francisco $200 million to settle a lawsuit over its blockbuster human growth hormone drug, Protropin. A Genentech scientist - and former UCSF graduate student - admitted that he stole a key bioengineered bacterium in a midnight raid on his old laboratory.
But foreign companies and governments are more worrisome. Some countries such as China are known for flouting U.S. intellectual property laws, especially when it comes to software and other technology. It's not out of the question, security experts say, that a foreign student could be planted in an American laboratory to take home secrets.
Thompson, the University of Maryland security chief, recalls a case some years ago in which a Chinese student with a part-time job as a building monitor was frequently seen nosing around a research building he wasn't assigned to inspect. Thompson never turned up evidence of espionage or theft. But the student was given a different job.
Other schools share the concern about scientific theft by foreign researchers.
"We worry about it," conceded Dr. Chi Dang, vice dean for research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. But, Dang said, monitoring foreign scientists - who conduct an increasing share of U.S. research - is almost impossible.
Many scientists and administrators are loath even to discuss the subject out of fear of opening themselves to accusations of racism and bias. And officials are quick to say that foreign-born scientists bring valuable experience and contacts to U.S. campuses.
Awaiting trial
Jiangyu Zhu, 30, a native of China, arrived at Harvard in 1997 after receiving degrees from Beijing University and Temple University in Philadelphia. Kayoko Kimbara, 32, received her doctoral degree from Tokyo University in Japan and went to Harvard a year after Zhu.
They worked in the lab of Frank McKeon, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School. Soon after they arrived, the pair were given routine paperwork to sign agreeing that any discovery they made at Harvard belonged to the university.
One of McKeon's goals was finding new drugs to prevent the rejection of organs in transplant patients. Using techniques developed by their mentor, Kimbara had discovered two genes by early 1999 that looked especially promising, a find for which Harvard filed a patent a few months later.
And, according to an FBI affidavit, that is when things started to change. Soon after finding the genes, the pair began going to the laboratory at night and avoiding McKeon. The result was "increasing tension in the lab," the affidavit said. (McKeon and Harvard declined to talk about the matter because of the criminal charges filed against the couple.)
Suspecting that something might be going on behind his back, McKeon combed a genetic database and discovered that Zhu and Kimbara had found at least seven other genes, which they hadn't told him about. One of them looked as promising as the two that Harvard was trying to patent.
By fall 1999, Zhu was secretly talking to the University of Texas about a job. He received an offer from the university in December, and the next day he sent an e-mail to a Japanese pharmaceutical company about the genes he and Kimbara had found. In the e-mail, he told the company that he hoped to commercialize the genes once settled in Texas and asked for the company's help.
Just before Harvard's Christmas holiday, tension between the two scientists and their boss came to a head. McKeon "confronted Zhu and Kimbara about the unauthorized work they were doing under the auspices of his lab and demanded an explanation," according to the affidavit. The document says the two scientists remained mum about plans to go to the University of Texas, which had offered them jobs.
During the holiday, the pair quietly removed more than 30 boxes of biological materials, books and documents and shipped them to Texas. They are also accused of taking several cartons filled with genes and proteins.
When McKeon and their colleagues returned, they found that many items in the lab "had been mislabeled or otherwise corrupted," the affidavit said.
In June 2000, Harvard recovered "a significant percentage" of its material. The Japanese company that received Harvard's genes cooperated with the FBI.
Later that year, Zhu and Kimbara left Texas and moved to California, where Kimbara worked at the Scripps Research Institute and Zhu at the University of California at San Diego. They were arrested last month after authorities became concerned that they might leave the country.
The couple's next court date is scheduled for July 17.