Exclusive | Poached eggheads: China lures away 105 top American minds in bid to dominate med, tech fields

China is aggressively poaching America’s top scientists in its rabid quest for global dominance in fields like medicine, space and tech, with at least 105 of the best and brightest defecting to the communist nation since 2024, The Post has learned.Nearly half of the recent wave of defectors over the last year is in biotechnology and medicine, according to a Post analysis, suggesting China is investing heavily to surpass the United States in medical innovation.Other deserters specialize in critical fields like space science, climate change, computers and semiconductors.They’ve all left US universities — or major corporations — to join what are in most cases Chinese Communist Party-funded institutions — lured by cash, with some like turncoat Harvard professor Charles Lieber promised a salary of $750,000 plus $150,000 in living expenses — and often their own sprawling research laboratories.Some of the prize CCP acquisitions include :“Both China and the United States recognize that the battlelines being drawn in the global war for scientific talent are critical for national security,” said Jack Burnham, senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ China Program.“Beijing is increasingly betting that paralyzed federal science funding, concerns over immigration status for foreign workers and students at US universities, and its own pool of increasingly cutting-edge researchers will give it an advantage over Washington to lure away the next generation of top researchers.”China was second only to the US as the world’s largest pharmaceutical market last year.It has long tried to figure out how to replicate American ingenuity, desperate to close the gap on drug research and development.

Since 2024, it leapfrogged the US in clinical trial volume.“There’s more and more interest in what China has been developing.They’re doing heavy recruiting in the US, and there’s an interest among scientists in the US because they have ...