A leading biochemist admitted Friday that she stole proprietary information potentially worth millions of dollars from a GlaxoSmithKline research facility in Montgomery County in hopes of launching a rival business in China with backing from that nation's government.
Yu Xue, 48, of Wayne, told a federal judge in Philadelphia that she pilfered promising therapies for cancer and other ailments, many of which she developed while working at the British pharmaceutical giant's Upper Merion location between 2006 and 2016.
The case is the latest in a string of recent prosecutions of Chinese American scientists accused of smuggling trade secrets stolen from U.S. companies to bolster China's competitive edge in science and technology fields.
"I'm very, very sorry for this mistake I made," Xue, a naturalized U.S. citizen, told U.S. District Judge Joel Slomsky. "At the very beginning I didn't have any intention of trying to steal anything."
But even as she was pleading guilty, Xue questioned the value and importance of the research she stole – auguring a debate over the seriousness of her crimes that is sure to dominate her sentencing in December.
"You can find all of the patents in the public domains, so I think the information I sent is not a trade secret," she told Slomsky. "A trade secret to me is not a publicly available [document]. The patents I sent to them is publicly available."
Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert J. Livermore disagreed.
"There are vast differences between the parties as to the value and importance of the information stolen," he said.
Still, Xue's guilty plea delivered a significant win to the U.S. Justice Department, which prior to her case had suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks in corporate espionage cases involving Chinese American scientists.
Both the Trump and Obama administrations have accused Chinese spy agencies of encouraging their nation's businesses to steal trade secrets from American corporations, and have made stanching that flow a priority. But recent high-profile blunders have prompted critics to accuse federal authorities of racial hysteria reminiscent of the Red Scares of the 1950s.
Prior to Friday's hearing, Xue's lawyer, Peter R. Zeidenberg, had likened her case to that of another scientist he represented — Temple University professor Xiaoxing Xi.
Authorities charged Xi with stealing sensitive U.S. technology in the field of superconductivity in May 2015, only to withdraw the case four months later after his legal team showed that agents had misunderstood the science, and that the information they had accused Xi of stealing had already been widely circulated in the public domain.
