Dr Li, who had worked at MD Anderson Cancer Centre since 2022, had been part of a team developing a vaccine aimed at preventing the spread of breast cancer. Authorities said he resigned from his position on July 1 and then transferred the nearly completed research to a server in China. He now faces potential federal charges for attempting to smuggle protected research materials.
For context, MD Anderson is the largest cancer treatment center in the world,
“Houston is proudly home to some of the most groundbreaking medical institutions in the world - publicly funded centers that are saving lives each day thanks to their innovative research,” District Attorney Sean Terre said in a statement.
You miss the crux of this despite quoting it yourself
The MDACC is publicly funded. They take money from our taxes.
Why would a “non-profit” be so concerned with keeping medical research data private? Unless they, perhaps, are planning to sell to a for-profit pharmaceutical company. This isn’t my analysis, it’s truth; this is how it works.
The argument you are laying out is the “national competitive edge”—ignoring the harm that this exact strategy has already caused—again, these are real events that represent a recurring pattern:
Covid mRNA research was funded in part by public grants; despite this, research was not shared as a public good leaving huge swaths of the Global South without timely access
The AIDS crisis was worse and decades longer in Asia and Africa than in the US, even while treatment existed, due to the privatization of medical data and the resulting monopoly abuse of treatment pricing
In 2025, similar patterns are playing out with cancer research, like from MDACC here. Except this time, the profiteering is done of the face of actual US citizens; the ones who paid for the research. In the US, novel cancer treatments can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, meaning that significant percentiles of sick taxpayers forgo treatment because the taxpayer research was sold to a private institution.
It is from these examples I feel it’s easy to conclude that publicly funded healthcare research should not be a trade secret. Any attempt to undermine that structure of abusing literally life-saving information for wealth sequestration gets a couple of cool points in my book.
For context, MD Anderson is the largest cancer treatment center in the world,
You miss the crux of this despite quoting it yourself
The MDACC is publicly funded. They take money from our taxes.
Why would a “non-profit” be so concerned with keeping medical research data private? Unless they, perhaps, are planning to sell to a for-profit pharmaceutical company. This isn’t my analysis, it’s truth; this is how it works.
The argument you are laying out is the “national competitive edge”—ignoring the harm that this exact strategy has already caused—again, these are real events that represent a recurring pattern:
It is from these examples I feel it’s easy to conclude that publicly funded healthcare research should not be a trade secret. Any attempt to undermine that structure of abusing literally life-saving information for wealth sequestration gets a couple of cool points in my book.