At least 105 of America’s top scientific minds have defected to Communist China since 2024. Not interns. Not lab assistants. The best and brightest from Harvard, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Penn State, and Texas. Nearly half of them in biotechnology and medicine.

Others in space science, semiconductors, computers, and climate research. All of them walking straight into Chinese Communist Party-funded labs, often with fat salaries, private research facilities, and the kind of regulatory freedom American scientists can only dream about while drowning in paperwork and funding fights.

The New York Post dug into the numbers. China is not politely recruiting. It is poaching. And it is working.

Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, is the most glaring example. Convicted in 2021 of lying to federal investigators about his secret ties to China’s Thousand Talents program, Lieber now runs a research institute in Shenzhen bankrolled by the Chinese government.

His new focus? Advancing brain-computer interfaces and what sources describe as the race toward an AI-enhanced super-soldier. This is the same man who received at least $8 million in U.S. Department of Defense funding over three decades at Harvard. American taxpayers paid for the research. Beijing is harvesting the results.

Then there is Omar Yaghi, who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating sponge-like materials that can pull drinking water from desert air or capture carbon dioxide. Yaghi left the University of California, Berkeley earlier this month for Tsinghua University in Beijing. He now leads an institute that uses artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of new materials. A Nobel laureate. Gone.

Zhonghua Gao, a leading brain development researcher who spent more than two decades at Pennsylvania State University’s College of Medicine studying autism and cancer with National Institutes of Health funding, left in January for the Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology. Virologist Haitao Hu walked away from the University of Texas and the work he did at Walter Reed for the U.S. military to join the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Microbiology, where he will lead vaccine development for HIV and other major viruses. Astrophysicist Liang Dai, a Sloan Research Fellowship winner once celebrated as one of the brightest young scientists in America, left Johns Hopkins for Fudan University.

These are not random departures. They are strategic captures. Jack Burnham of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies put it plainly: “Both China and the United States recognize that the battlelines being drawn in the global war for scientific talent are critical for national security.”

Beijing is betting that paralyzed federal science funding, visa headaches, and its own aggressive cash offers will peel away the next generation of talent. So far, the bet is paying off.

Dr. Roberta Shapiro of Columbia University Medical Center noted the practical lure. Chinese labs offer scientists more freedom to push treatments forward without the regulatory thicket that has bogged down American research.

China has already leapfrogged the United States in clinical trial volume. It sits second only to America as the world’s largest pharmaceutical market. The Communist Party is not hiding its ambitions. It wants to dominate medicine, tech, and space, and it is willing to buy the minds that make those breakthroughs possible.

The FBI has warned about this for years. Chinese talent programs are not benign academic exchanges. They are instruments designed to vacuum up foreign technology and expertise to erode America’s competitive edge and advance Beijing’s military goals.

Assistant Director John Brown told Congress the truth without the usual diplomatic padding: “Time and time again, the Communist government of China has proven that it will use any means necessary to advance its interests at the expense of others. Beijing aims to acquire our technology — often in the early stages of development — as well as our expertise, to erode our competitive advantage and supplant the United States as a global superpower.”

We funded these researchers. We trained them. We gave them the laboratories, the grants, and the prestige. Then we watched as many of them decided the Chinese Communist Party offered a better deal. Some left under a cloud of legal trouble. Others simply took the money and the freedom. Either way, the intellectual capital America spent decades building is being transferred overseas.

This is not abstract geopolitics. It is national security in real time. The same fields these scientists dominate — biotech, advanced materials, brain-machine interfaces, semiconductors — sit at the heart of future military and economic power. When a convicted Harvard chemist rebuilds his lab in Shenzhen to work on technology the People’s Liberation Army has already flagged as a priority, the danger is not theoretical. When a Nobel Prize winner walks away from Berkeley to accelerate materials discovery under Chinese direction, the competitive clock is ticking.

Scripture is not silent on the stewardship of gifts. “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more” (Luke 12:48).

America has been given extraordinary scientific talent and the resources to develop it. Squandering that inheritance by allowing a hostile regime to buy it out from under us is not merely a policy failure. It is a failure of wisdom and vigilance.

The Chinese Communist Party understands what too many American institutions still refuse to admit. Talent is power. And power, once transferred, is rarely returned. The 105 scientists already gone are not the end of the story. They are the warning.