From ScienceMag:

A finales de 2024, los filántropos interesados en la conservación de la vida silvestre recibieron una propuesta intrigante: donar a un nuevo fondo que daría pequeñas becas a jóvenes investigadores en busca de nuevas especies de animales tropicales, y a cambio, ayudar a nombrarlas. El Arteaga Species Discovery Fund fue creación de Alejandro Arteaga, un herpetólogo en Ecuador decidido a impulsar la conservación tropical acelerando los esfuerzos por documentar la biodiversidad. “Es poco probable que logremos salvar especies si ni siquiera sabemos que existen”, escribió Arteaga en un sitio web que promocionaba el fondo.

Involucrar a patrocinadores en el nombramiento de descubrimientos científicos no era algo nuevo; desde hace tiempo, los científicos han honrado a sus benefactores poniendo sus nombres a plantas, animales e incluso estrellas recién descritas, o permitiéndoles elegir un nombre. El propio Arteaga había bautizado nuevas especies en honor a figuras prominentes que apoyaban su trabajo, entre ellas el actor Leonardo DiCaprio y el líder islámico Shah Rahim al-Hussaini (también conocido como Aga Khan V). Pero la propuesta de financiamiento de Arteaga desató una reacción negativa entre otros herpetólogos. Algunos llevaban ya años criticando este tipo de esquemas de “paga por participar”, temiendo que incentivaran a los investigadores a dejar de lado el rigor científico con tal de publicar descubrimientos capaces de atraer atención y donaciones. Otros comenzaron a preguntarse si los posibles donantes conocían la controversial reputación de Arteaga.

Durante la última década, el carismático investigador de 34 años se ha convertido en una figura prominente de la herpetología sudamericana, conocido por publicar descripciones de decenas de nuevas especies de serpientes, lagartijas y ranas, así como algunas de las guías de herpetología más importantes de Ecuador, ilustradas con sus vívidas fotografías. Ha recibido premios prestigiosos, acaparado titulares internacionales y reunido decenas de miles de seguidores en redes sociales. Además, se ha dedicado a conseguir financiamiento para expandir áreas de conservación, incluidas las reservas ecológicas Arlequín y Pitala en Ecuador.

Pero Arteaga también ha enfrentado acusaciones de mala conducta científica, ha sido vetado de algunas de las principales colecciones y reservas de Ecuador, y se ha distanciado de profesores y colegas que alguna vez lo apoyaron. Sus detractores además sostienen que, al publicar descripciones de nuevas especies cuya validez es cuestionada, ha inflado artificialmente el número de especies, lo que potencialmente podría provocar que escasos fondos de conservación se desperdicien en organismos que apenas necesitan protección e incluso complicar los esfuerzos por desarrollar antídotos capaces de salvar vidas frente a mordeduras de serpientes venenosas.

La controversia que rodea a Arteaga ha puesto en evidencia las tensiones que atraviesan a la herpetología tropical, un campo con escaso financiamiento que atrae tanto el interés científico más riguroso como legiones de coleccionistas, fotógrafos y fanáticos de la vida silvestre. La tentación de exagerar descubrimientos y apelar al entusiasmo de los donantes puede ser abrumadora, dicen los investigadores. “Sé que es difícil conseguir financiamiento”, dice Jacobo Reyes-Velasco, biólogo de la organización mexicana de conservación Herp.mx. Pero las prácticas de Arteaga “abren una puerta muy peligrosa [porque] incentivan a la gente a describir cualquier cosa con tal de obtener recursos”.

Arteaga reconoce que ha cometido errores en su afán por describir y defender la naturaleza. Pero también sostiene que sus métodos son una respuesta necesaria al estado de la comunidad científica ecuatoriana, que él describe como estancada, rígida y dominada por el amiguismo. Además, los acusa de no estar respondiendo a una crisis ambiental y científica cada vez más urgente en una de las regiones más biodiversas del mundo. La taxonomía “está al borde de la extinción” en Sudamérica, dice, justo cuando más se necesita.

El carisma de Arteaga se vuelve evidente mientras conversa. Recientemente, en una videollamada, hablaba en voz baja y pausada mientras descansaba en el patio de su casa de madera, en lo profundo del bosque ecuatoriano. Su mirada suave y su manera serena de hablar inspiraban confianza. Pero el ambiente cambiaba cuando alguna pregunta lo incomodaba. Entonces comenzaba a medir cada frase con cuidado, como si la pusiera a prueba antes de dejarla salir de su boca.

Nacido en Venezuela, Arteaga vivió sus primeros años en Mérida, en las montañas del occidente del país, donde pasaba horas explorando los frondosos bosques nublados. Hijo de un fotógrafo y una pintora, rápidamente desarrolló su sensibilidad artística. A los 15 años, después de recibir su primera cámara, algunos conservacionistas amigos de su familia comenzaron a invitarlo a expediciones de campo para fotografiar vida silvestre. Más tarde, su familia se mudó a Ecuador, donde, a los 17 años, dejó su primera huella en la taxonomía al descubrir una nueva especie de rana. Llevó el espécimen al museo de zoología de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, donde después ingresaría como estudiante de licenciatura.

Para entonces, dice Arteaga, ya sabía que quería convertirse en herpetólogo y taxónomo. Ya había comenzado a trabajar en la publicación de la descripción formal de la rana que encontró, a la que llamó Pristimantis bambu en honor al bosque de bambú donde vivía. Añadir un nuevo organismo al árbol de la vida, dice, le produjo una profunda satisfacción. “Es lindo poder trascender de alguna manera y darte cuenta de que dejaste una huella, aunque sea breve, pero que queda ahí”.

Es poco probable que logremos salvar especies si ni siquiera sabemos que existen.

• Alejandro Arteaga

Las habilidades del joven investigador impresionaron a Omar Torres-Carvajal, curador de herpetología de la PUCE. “Vi en él a un estudiante talentoso, con potencial para llegar lejos”, recuerda. Pero el entusiasmo de Arteaga pronto lo llevó a cometer su primer tropiezo. Una tarde de 2011, Torres-Carvajal se enteró por personal del museo de que el estudiante había violado una regla fundamental al revisar sin autorización especímenes de la colección de herpetología, la más grande de Ecuador. Arteaga explicó que estaba reuniendo información para una guía de campo que esperaba escribir. Sin embargo, el personal consideró la falta especialmente grave porque los especímenes, muchos de ellos irremplazables, podrían dañarse o incluso perderse. Finalmente, decidieron prohibirle el acceso a la colección.

La prohibición “dolió profundamente”, recuerda Arteaga. Aún así, terminó su licenciatura en la PUCE y pudo continuar trabajando en la guía de campo tras obtener acceso a otras dos importantes colecciones de herpetología en Ecuador. En 2013 publicó The Amphibians and Reptiles of Mindo: Life in the Cloudforest. El libro, que incluye fotografías de 48 especies registradas en Ecuador, hoy es considerado un clásico dentro del campo.

Viéndolo en retrospectiva, investigadores que han trabajado con Arteaga dicen que aquel incidente en el museo anticipó dos rasgos que desde entonces han marcado su carrera: un impulso incansable por compartir su pasión por la herpetología y una tendencia a transgredir reglas científicas y normas éticas en nombre de la conservación. Ambas características han colocado repetidamente a Arteaga en el centro de la controversia.

En 2020, por ejemplo, Arteaga terminó vetado de varias reservas ecológicas en Ecuador. Seis años antes había cofundado Tropical Herping, una empresa de ecoturismo que buscaba apoyar la conservación permitiendo que entusiastas de la herpetología de distintas partes del mundo acompañaran a investigadores en expediciones de campo para fotografiar vida silvestre y buscar nuevas especies. La empresa prosperó después de que sus impactantes fotografías y descubrimientos comenzaron a aparecer en medios de alto perfil como National Geographic. Además de apoyar a un equipo de fotógrafos, organizaban expediciones por Sudamérica, así como en Madagascar y Sri Lanka.

Pero la empresa entró en conflicto con la Fundación Ecominga, una organización sin fines de lucro que administra las reservas ecológicas. En una carta enviada a Tropical Herping en diciembre de 2020, la fundación informó que prohibiría el ingreso de la empresa a sus propiedades porque su personal había entrado a reservas sin las autorizaciones requeridas y se había negado a “trabajar de manera respetuosa y cooperativa” con los guardaparques y científicos de Ecominga.

Mientras Tropical Herping lidiaba con las consecuencias de esa ruptura, la empresa quedó envuelta en una segunda controversia después de que Paul Bertner, un fotógrafo de vida silvestre que había participado en una expedición, acusara al personal de maltratar animales. En su sitio web, Bertner escribió que los herpetólogos guardaban animales recolectados en bolsas de plástico y los dejaban durante días debajo de camas de hotel. También afirmó que el grupo manipulaba a los animales de manera cruel para conseguir sus impactantes fotografías. Las acusaciones alimentaron un debate sobre si algunos entusiastas de la herpetología estaban usando “la investigación científica como excusa para poder obtener la fotografía”, dice Bertner.

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La serpiente caracolera de DiCaprio (Sibon irmelindicaprioae) es una de las tres docenas de especies descritas por el herpetólogo Alejandro Arteaga y sus colegas. Esta serpiente no venenosa, que habita los bosques del este de Panamá y el oeste de Colombia, fue nombrada en honor al actor Leonardo DiCaprio y su madre, Irmelin Indenbirken.Iván Lau/iNaturalist

Bothriechis nigroadspersus es una víbora de pestañas, un grupo de serpientes conocido por las distintivas escamas sobre los ojos. Estas serpientes se encuentran a lo largo de Mesoamérica.William Lamar

La víbora de pestañas Bothriechis nigroadspersus puede presentar una gran variedad de coloraciones, incluida una variante verde.William Lamar

Algunas variantes de la víbora de pestañas Bothriechis nigroadspersus son amarillas.William Lamar

El lagarto de Pinocho (Anolis proboscis), también conocido como anolis cornudo ecuatoriano, fue descubierto por primera vez en 1953, pero los investigadores no volvieron a documentar otro avistamiento hasta 2004. La especie está catalogada como amenazada por la Unión Internacional para la Conservación de la Naturaleza.Melvin Grey/NPL/Minden Pictures

La rana de lluvia nocturna Pristimantis mindo habita los bosques nublados del noroeste de Ecuador. El herpetólogo Alejandro Arteaga y sus colegas describieron la especie en 2013.John Sullivan/iNaturalist

La rana de lluvia de Buenaventura (Pristimantis buenaventura) es una especie de rana ladrona, conocida por saltarse la etapa de renacuajo y salir directamente de los huevos como ranas completamente formadas. Descubierta en la reserva ecológica Buenaventura, en el sur de Ecuador, la especie fue descrita por el herpetólogo Alejandro Arteaga y sus colegas en 2016.timboyok/iNaturalist

 

 

Arteaga reconoce que algunos animales fueron manipulados de manera brusca y asegura que el equipo de Tropical Herping era joven y estaba intentando producir las mejores fotografías posibles. También sostiene que la controversia tuvo un efecto constructivo, pues provocó “un cambio radical” en la manera en que él y otros miembros de la comunidad herpetológica ecuatoriana fotografían especímenes silvestres, una actividad que asegura haber dejado atrás. Pero califica las acusaciones de Ecominga como “una absoluta ridiculez”. Según él, las denuncias surgieron de científicos de la junta directiva de la fundación que no querían competir con él en la carrera académica por describir nuevas especies, y las versiones fueron distorsionándose a medida que se propagaban. Algunos incluso sostenían que “yo colaboraba con traficantes de animales silvestres”, dice. “Hasta el día de hoy no entiendo cómo ni dónde nació ese rumor”.

Con el tiempo, el trabajo en Tropical Herping hizo que Arteaga se diera cuenta de que ser guía de ecoturismo “no era lo mío”, dice. “Hay que ser más paciente, más extrovertido y tener mejores habilidades sociales”. En 2023 pasó a un nuevo proyecto y fundó la organización de conservación Khamai Foundation.

Desde entonces, el perfil público de Arteaga no ha hecho más que crecer. En redes sociales, las fotografías donde aparece manipulando serpientes de colores brillantes y recorriendo bosques le han ganado una audiencia cada vez mayor. Publicó su tercer libro, una exhaustiva guía sobre los reptiles de Ecuador, además de una serie de artículos científicos describiendo algunas de las 36 nuevas especies que asegura haber descubierto. Y en 2024, el prestigioso Explorers Club de Nueva York lo incluyó en su lista de “50 personas extraordinarias que están realizando un trabajo sobresaliente para promover la ciencia”. En un ensayo publicado junto al reconocimiento, Arteaga escribió: “Encaro cada día como si fuera una misión: salvar y descubrir tantas especies como sea posible, mientras inspiro a otros a emprender un camino similar”.

La trayectoria de Arteaga ha dejado a muchos herpetólogos más inquietos que inspirados. Las dudas sobre su integridad científica persisten y varios investigadores apuntan a tres episodios recientes.

Una mañana de marzo de 2025, Arteaga entregó al Vivarium de Quito, un pequeño zoológico y centro de investigación dedicado a reptiles, frascos con especímenes de 183 lagartijas recolectadas en Ecuador. La legislación ecuatoriana exige que los investigadores cuenten con permisos de colecta y transporte para este tipo de especímenes y que los depositen en una colección reconocida. Pero María Elena Barragán, directora del vivarium y herpetóloga, comenzó a inquietarse porque la documentación que acompañaba a los ejemplares parecía incompleta. Sus preocupaciones aumentaron, dice, después de que Arteaga evitara responder con claridad preguntas sobre los permisos durante una llamada telefónica. Temiendo que los frascos se hubieran convertido en “una bomba de tiempo”, notificó el problema al Ministerio del Ambiente de Ecuador. Para su sorpresa y angustia, un funcionario le dijo que el simple hecho de almacenar los especímenes podía ponerla en problemas legales, dejándola ansiosa y atemorizada. “Estoy cayendo en depresión”, dijo a Science a finales de 2025. (El Ministerio del Ambiente no respondió a una solicitud de comentarios.)

La angustia de Barragán resultaba familiar para el personal del museo de zoología de la Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ). En diciembre de 2023, dicen, dudas similares sobre permisos llevaron al museo a rechazar una solicitud de Arteaga para almacenar cinco especímenes de serpientes del género Ninia, conocidas como “serpientes cafetaleras” porque suelen encontrarse en plantaciones de café. Diego Cisneros, director del museo de la USFQ, afirma que los especímenes sin la documentación correspondiente están “fuera del marco de la legalidad” y podrían exponer a toda la institución a sanciones.

Sin embargo, apenas unos días después, Arteaga y un colega publicaron en Evolutionary Systematics un artículo anunciando el descubrimiento de una nueva especie de Ninia. El trabajo señalaba que uno de los especímenes analizados estaba depositado en la USFQ. Pero al revisar el artículo, el personal del museo descubrió que los números de identificación de los especímenes mencionados en la investigación —códigos únicos considerados esenciales en la taxonomía moderna— no coincidían con ninguna serpiente cafetalera de su colección.

Hasta el día de hoy, dice Cisneros, el supuesto espécimen nunca ha aparecido. El curador informó la discrepancia al Ministerio del Ambiente de Ecuador. El museo presentó una segunda denuncia el año pasado, cuando supo que Arteaga afirmaba haber recolectado las lagartijas que quería depositar en el Vivarium de Quito bajo un permiso otorgado en colaboración con la USFQ. Eso no podía ser cierto, escribió el personal del museo, porque la colaboración con Arteaga había terminado en 2023.

Me di cuenta demasiado tarde de hasta dónde era capaz de llegar

• Juan Guayasamín
• Universidad San Francisco de Quito

El tercer episodio involucra un artículo que Arteaga publicó en Evolutionary Systematics en 2024 y que recibió una amplia atención mediática. El estudio describía cinco nuevas especies de víboras de pestañas, serpientes venenosas de Centro y Sudamérica conocidas por sus colores brillantes y por las escamas sobre sus ojos que parecen pestañas. El artículo casi duplicó el número de especies conocidas de este grupo. Pero se basó en gran medida en análisis de ADN mitocondrial, una técnica que muchos investigadores consideran insuficiente para diferenciar de manera confiable especies estrechamente relacionadas. Si métodos similares se aplicaran a humanos, dice William Lamar, herpetólogo de la Universidad de Texas en Tyler, “nuestros padres y abuelos serían considerados nuevas especies de Homo sapiens”.

Las dudas sobre los métodos del artículo llevaron a Jacobo Reyes-Velasco, herpetólogo independiente, a reanalizar los datos. En octubre de 2024 publicó un estudio en Herpetozoa cuestionando las nuevas especies de Arteaga. Él y otros investigadores criticaron el trabajo por contribuir a un problema conocido como inflación taxonómica, es decir, la división de especies ya conocidas en múltiples especies nuevas cuya validez puede ser dudosa. El problema no solo contamina la literatura científica y genera desorden en los inventarios nacionales de biodiversidad, dicen los investigadores, sino que además obliga a los científicos a invertir tiempo y recursos limitados en intentar corregir el registro científico.

Las preocupaciones no son únicamente académicas, añaden los críticos. La inflación taxonómica puede provocar un desperdicio de fondos de conservación al hacer que ciertas especies parezcan raras o amenazadas cuando en realidad forman parte de poblaciones más amplias y saludables. Incluso puede tener consecuencias graves para personas mordidas por serpientes venenosas. Los médicos que atienden estos casos deben administrar antivenenos específicos para cada especie, de modo que la confusión sobre la identidad de una serpiente podría derivar en una equivocación fatal.

Dadas las implicaciones que esto puede tener en el mundo real, utilizar métodos cuestionados para identificar nuevas especies “es decepcionante”, dice David Hillis, biólogo evolutivo de la Universidad de Texas en Austin, quien ha criticado lo que considera un uso excesivo de métodos basados en ADN mitocondrial para describir nuevas especies de reptiles y anfibios. “Parece que la gente quiere llamar la atención sobre sus estudios creando nuevos nombres”.

Arteaga acepta responsabilidad por algunos de sus errores. Admite, por ejemplo, que no siguió los procedimientos correctos para numerar los especímenes al publicar el artículo sobre las serpientes cafetaleras. También concede que el estudio de ADN mitocondrial sobre las víboras de pestañas “no es perfecto, las interpretaciones no son perfectas”. Pero señala que el método es de bajo costo, lo que lo vuelve accesible para investigadores en un país con recursos limitados como Ecuador, y asegura estar satisfecho de que haya ayudado a llamar la atención sobre estas serpientes.

En el caso del Vivarium de Quito, Arteaga atribuye la disputa a un tecnicismo administrativo, aunque lamenta haber roto relaciones con Barragán, una de las pocas curadoras en Ecuador con quien aún mantenía una buena relación. También responsabiliza a herpetólogos consolidados del país por muchos de sus problemas, y asegura que quieren “neutralizar” su carrera. Se considera a sí mismo un “rebelde”, dice, enfrentado a científicos más interesados en engrosar sus currículums que en describir y salvar la biodiversidad. Según Arteaga, algunos curadores de museos con los que trabajó al inicio de su carrera le exigían agregar sus nombres como coautores en artículos sobre nuevas especies a cambio de permitirle acceso a las colecciones, incluso cuando no habían contribuido a la investigación. “Ponen excusas [para bloquear el acceso] hasta que se les ofrece coautoría”, dice.

Las tensiones entre investigadores y curadores existen desde hace tiempo en Ecuador, dicen científicos que trabajan en el país. Pero “la mayoría de los biólogos en Ecuador tienen buenas relaciones entre sí, somos profesionales”, dice el herpetólogo Juan Guayasamín, quien durante la última década fue mentor y amigo cercano de Arteaga. Pero Arteaga, dice, terminó convencido de que los curadores y colegas estaban intentando perjudicar su carrera.

Por su parte, Arteaga considera que algunos de sus problemas relacionados con permisos, como no entregar la documentación completa de ciertos especímenes, son una forma de resistencia. “Es mi manera de expresar mi desacuerdo con cómo se hacen las cosas”, dice, al sostener que esas “formalidades” burocráticas “frenan el avance de la ciencia” y complican innecesariamente los esfuerzos de conservación. Espera que su postura provoque una discusión entre herpetólogos sobre cuáles deberían ser sus verdaderas prioridades. Mientras tanto, promete que “no me voy a doblegar”, incluso si eso implica enfrentar sanciones por parte de agencias gubernamentales o instituciones académicas en Ecuador. “Si voy a ser la primera cabeza en caer… bueno”.

Y descarta las preocupaciones de que esté contribuyendo a la inflación taxonómica. “Puede sonar trivial”, dice Arteaga, pero nombrar una nueva especie “me facilita a mí y a las organizaciones de conservación conseguir recursos para protegerla”. Varias especies de ranas que ha descrito, por ejemplo, fueron posteriormente reconocidas como amenazadas por la Unión Internacional para la Conservación de la Naturaleza, un paso que con frecuencia resulta clave para obtener apoyo.

Las acciones de Arteaga tampoco han caído bien entre otros investigadores. Muchos se han distanciado de él, en parte por temor a que sus controversias terminen afectando sus propias carreras. “Se está aislando”, dice Guayasamín.

Para Guayasamín, quien fue mentor de Arteaga durante años después de que fuera vetado de la PUCE y trabajó con él en Tropical Herping, la controversia de las serpientes cafetaleras en 2023 marcó un punto de quiebre. Guayasamín dice que comenzó a preocuparse por el comportamiento de Arteaga mientras colaboraban en una guía de campo de las Islas Galápagos publicada en 2019. En ese entonces atribuyó los problemas al entusiasmo juvenil y la inexperiencia. Pero el episodio de las Ninia lo hizo replantearse todo y finalmente romper relaciones con él. “Me di cuenta demasiado tarde de hasta dónde era capaz de llegar”, dice Guayasamín. “Alejandro no entiende que hacer ciencia implica seguir las reglas básicas del juego. Es como si viviera en una realidad paralela”.

Arteaga tenía ya pocos defensores a finales de 2024, cuando presentó su plan para subastar los derechos de nombramiento de nuevas especies con el fin de financiar el Arteaga’s Species Discovery Fund. El fondo, lanzado junto a Rosalía Arteaga, expresidenta de Ecuador y además tía abuela de Arteaga, busca recaudar 10 millones de dólares para apoyar a 100 taxónomos menores de 35 años. Los investigadores recibirán becas de entre 2.000 y 10.000 dólares para ayudarlos a descubrir nuevas especies alrededor del mundo.

Arteaga señala que otras organizaciones en Ecuador, incluida Ecominga, también se han beneficiado de campañas de recaudación similares. Sin embargo, otros investigadores tenían profundas reservas. Lamar, por ejemplo, sostiene que, aunque conseguir financiamiento para la taxonomía es un problema real, “llenar de homenajes cuestionablemente justificados a ricos y famosos no es una manera inteligente de combatirlo”.

Esas objeciones terminaron convenciendo a Arteaga de abandonar la idea. “La comunidad taxonómica latinoamericana no está lista para esta idea”, dice. En su lugar, el sitio web ahora promete que los donantes serán reconocidos en cualquier publicación científica, comunicado de prensa o documental que resulte del proyecto y que incluso podrían tener una especie nombrada en su honor “a discreción exclusiva de los autores”.

Aun así, considera que haber dado marcha atrás fue una oportunidad perdida. El financiamiento para la taxonomía y la conservación en Ecuador “es un chiste”, dice, y las subastas de nombres podrían ayudar a llenar ese vacío. “Es eso”, afirma, “o la especie no se describe y no se salva”.

Sin embargo, algunos de sus antiguos colegas ven ese tipo de predicciones fatalistas como algo conveniente para sus propios intereses y, además, contraproducente. La investigación avanza a través de la colaboración y “la ciencia y la conservación siempre van de la mano”, dice Guayasamín. Pero “si una pierde credibilidad, toda la estructura se derrumba”.

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From ScienceMag:

In late 2024, philanthropists interested in wildlife conservation got an intriguing offer: Donate to a new fund that would provide small grants to young researchers seeking to discover new kinds of tropical animals, and you could help name the new species. The Arteaga Species Discovery Fund was the brainchild of Alejandro Arteaga, a herpetologist in Ecuador eager to boost tropical conservation by accelerating efforts to document biodiversity. “We are unlikely to be effective towards saving species if we remain unaware they exist,” Arteaga wrote on a website promoting the fund.

Involving patrons in naming scientific discoveries wasn’t new; scientists have long honored financial supporters by attaching their names to newly described plants, animals, and even stars, or allowing donors to select a name. Arteaga himself had named new species after prominent figures who supported his work, including actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Islamic leader Shah Rahim al-Hussaini (also known as Aga Khan V). But Arteaga’s fundraising pitch sparked a backlash from other herpetologists. Some had long been critical of such pay-to-play schemes, fearing they encourage researchers to sidestep scientific rigor in a bid to publish new discoveries that would attract attention and donations. Others wondered whether potential donors were aware of Arteaga’s decidedly mixed reputation.

Over the past decade, the charismatic 34-year-old researcher has become a prominent figure in South American herpetology, known for publishing descriptions of dozens of new species of snakes, lizards, and frogs as well as some of Ecuador’s most important herpetology guidebooks, illustrated with his vivid photographs. He’s won prestigious awards and attracted global headlines, as well as tens of thousands of social media followers. And he’s devoted himself to securing funding to expand conservation areas, including Ecuador’s Arlequin and Pitala ecological preserves.

But Arteaga has also faced allegations of research misconduct, been barred from entering some of Ecuador’s leading museum collections and preserves, and alienated many once-supportive professors and colleagues. Arteaga’s detractors also assert that, by publishing new species descriptions of contested accuracy, he has artificially inflated species counts—potentially causing scarce conservation funding to be wasted on organisms in little need of help and even complicating efforts to provide lifesaving antidotes to venomous snake bites.

The controversy swirling around Arteaga has highlighted tensions facing tropical herpetology, a poorly financed field that attracts both sober scientific interest and legions of enthusiastic collectors, photographers, and wildlife fans. The temptation to hype discoveries and play to donors can be overwhelming, researchers say. “I know it is difficult to secure funding,” says Jacobo Reyes Velasco, a biologist at the Mexican conservation nonprofit Herp.mx. But Arteaga’s practices “open a very dangerous door [because they] encourage people to describe whatever they can in order to obtain resources.”

Arteaga concedes he’s made mistakes in his zeal to describe and defend nature. But he also suggests his methods are a necessary response to the state of Ecuador’s scientific community, which he describes as stale, rigid, and cronyistic. He also charges it is failing to address an increasingly urgent environmental and scientific crisis in one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. The field of taxonomy “is on the verge of extinction” in South America, he says—just when it is needed most.

Arteaga’s charisma comes across in conversation. During a recent online video interview, he spoke in a low, measured voice as he relaxed on the patio of his wooden house deep in the Ecuadorian forest. His soft gaze and unhurried cadence invited trust. But the atmosphere shifted when questions unsettled him. He weighed each sentence with care, as if testing it before letting it go.

Born in Venezuela, Arteaga spent his early years in Mérida, in the country’s western mountains, where he spent hours exploring the lush cloud forests. The son of a photographer and a painter, he developed an artistic sensibility. At 15, after he got his first camera, conservationists who were friends of the family began to invite him on field expeditions to photograph wildlife. Arteaga’s family later moved to Ecuador where, at 17, he made his first mark in taxonomy by discovering a new species of frog. He brought the specimen to the zoology museum at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador (PUCE), where he would enroll as an undergraduate.

By then, Arteaga says he knew he wanted to become a herpetologist and taxonomist. He was already working to publish the formal description of the frog he had found, which he named Pristimantis bambu after the bamboo forest where it lived. It was deeply satisfying, he says, to add a new organism to the tree of life. “It’s nice to be able to transcend in some way and realize you’ve left a mark, however brief, that stays behind.”

We are unlikely to be effective towards saving species if we remain unaware they exist.

• Alejandro Arteaga

The young researcher’s abilities impressed Omar Torres-Carvajal, PUCE’s curator of herpetology. “I saw in him a talented student with the potential to go far,” he says. But Arteaga’s enthusiasm soon led to a setback. One afternoon in 2011, Torres-Carvajal heard from museum staff that the student had violated a cardinal rule: rifling through specimens in the herpetology collection, Ecuador’s largest, without permission. Arteaga explained he was gathering information for a field guide he hoped to write. But staffers considered the violation so serious—because irreplaceable specimens could be damaged or even lost—that they banned Arteaga from the collection.

The ban “hurt deeply,” Arteaga recalls. Still, he finished his undergraduate degree at PUCE and was able to continue his work on the field guide by winning access to two other important herpetology collections in Ecuador. And in 2013, he published the field guide, The Amphibians and Reptiles of Mindo: Life in the Cloudforest. It features photographs of 48 species found in Ecuador and is now considered a classic in the field.

In retrospect, say researchers who have worked with Arteaga, the museum incident highlighted two traits that have since characterized his career: a relentless drive to share his passion for herpetology—and a penchant for violating scientific norms and cutting ethical corners in the name of building support for conservation. Those traits have repeatedly placed Arteaga at the center of controversy.

In 2020, for example, Arteaga found himself banned from several ecological reserves in Ecuador. Six years earlier, he had co-founded Tropical Herping, an ecotourism company that planned to support conservation by having herpeto-enthusiasts from around the world pay to accompany researchers into the field as they photographed wildlife and searched for new species. The firm thrived after its compelling photos and discoveries began to appear in high-profile outlets such as National Geographic. In addition to supporting a team of photographers, it ran tours across South America as well as in Madagascar and Sri Lanka.

But the firm clashed with the Ecominga Foundation, a nonprofit that manages the ecological reserves. In a December 2020 letter to Tropical Herping, the foundation wrote that it was banning the firm from its properties because its staff had entered reserves without the required authorizations and refused to “work respectfully and cooperatively” with Ecominga’s rangers and scientists.

Even as Tropical Herping dealt with the fallout from the rupture, it became enmeshed in a second controversy after Paul Bertner, a wildlife photographer who had joined an expedition, accused the firm’s staff of mistreating animals. The herpetologists had stored collected animals in plastic bags and placed them under hotel beds for days, he wrote on his website. Bertner also claimed the group torturously posed animals to capture their stunning photographs. The accusations spurred debate about whether some herpetology enthusiasts were using “scientific research as an excuse to be able to get the photography,” Bertner says.

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DiCaprio’s snail-eating snake (Sibon irmelindicaprioae) is one of three dozen species named by herpetologist Alejandro Arteaga and colleagues. The nonvenomous snake, which is found in the forests of eastern Panama and western Colombia, is named after actor Leonardo DiCaprio and his mother, Irmelin Indenbirken.Iván Lau/iNaturalist

Bothriechis nigroadspersus is an eyelash viper, known for the distinctive scales above their eyes. They are found across Mesoamerica.William Lamar

The eyelash viper Bothriechis nigroadspersus can have a variety of colorings, including a green variant.William Lamar

Some variants of the eyelash viper Nigroadspersus clodomiro are yellow. William Lamar

The Pinocchio lizard (Anolis proboscis), also known as the Ecuadorian horned anole, was first discovered in 1953, but researchers did not document another sighting until 2004. The species is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.Melvin Grey/NPL/Minden Pictures

The nocturnal rainfrog Pristimantis mindo is found in the cloud forests of northwestern Ecuador. Herpetologist Alejandro Arteaga and colleagues described the species in 2013.John Sullivan/iNaturalist

The Buenaventura rainfrog (Pristimantis buenaventura) is a species of robber frog, known for bypassing the tadpole stage and hatching directly from eggs as fully formed frogs. Discovered in the Buenaventura ecological reserve in southern Ecuador, herpetologist Alejandro Arteaga and colleagues described the species in 2016.timboyok/iNaturalist

 

 

Arteaga acknowledges some of the animals were handled roughly, saying Tropical Herping’s team was young and trying to produce the best possible photographs. And he says the controversy had a constructive outcome, leading to “a radical change” in how he and others in Ecuador’s herpetology community photograph wild specimens—an activity he no longer pursues. But he calls the allegations leveled by Ecominga “a complete absurdity.” He asserts the claims originated with scientists on Ecominga’s board who didn’t want to compete with him in the scholarly race to describe new species, and they became more distorted as they spread. Some held that “I was collaborating with wildlife traffickers,” he says. “Where and how that rumor took root eludes me to this day.”

Ultimately, Arteaga’s work at Tropical Herping made him realize being an ecotourism guide “wasn’t for me,” he says. “You have to be more patient, more extroverted, and have stronger social skills.” In 2023, he moved on to a new project, founding a conservation nonprofit called the Khamai Foundation.

Since then, Arteaga’s public profile has only grown. On social media, photos of him wrangling brightly colored snakes and tramping through forests have gained a growing following. He published his third book—an exhaustive guide to Ecuador’s reptiles—and a string of papers describing some of the 36 new species he says he’s discovered. And in 2024, the prestigious Explorers Club of New York City named him to its list of “50 extraordinary people who are doing remarkable work to promote science.” In an accompanying essay, Arteaga wrote, “I approach each day as if on a mission: to save and discover as many species as possible, all the while inspiring others to embark on a similar journey.”

Arteaga’s journey has left many herpetologists feeling less than inspired. They continue to question his scientific integrity, pointing to three recent episodes.

One day in March 2025, Arteaga delivered jars containing specimens of 183 lizards collected in Ecuador to the Quito Vivarium, a small zoo and research center dedicated to reptiles. Ecuador requires researchers to have collecting and transport permits for such specimens and to house them in a recognized collection. But the vivarium’s director, herpetologist María Elena Barragán, became uneasy because the paperwork accompanying the specimens appeared incomplete. Her concerns grew, she says, after Arteaga deflected questions about the paperwork during a phone call. Fearing the jars had become “a time bomb,” she notified Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment about the issue. To Barragán’s dismay, a ministry official said simply storing the jars put her in legal jeopardy, leaving her feeling anxious and afraid. “I’m falling into a depression,” she told Science in late 2025. (The Environment Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.)

Barragán’s angst was familiar to staff at the zoology museum at the University of San Francisco de Quito (USFQ). In December 2023, they say, similar questions about permits prompted them to deny Arteaga’s request to store five specimens of snakes in the genus Ninia—known as coffee snakes because they are often found on coffee plantations—that he had collected. USFQ museum director Diego Cisneros says specimens that lack permit paperwork are “outside the bounds of legality” and could expose the entire institution to penalties. Just days later, however, Arteaga and a colleague published a paper announcing the discovery of a new Ninia species in Evolutionary Systematics. The paper said USFQ housed one of the specimens the researchers had analyzed. But museum staff found the specimen identification numbers listed in the paper—unique codes that are essentially a requirement of modern taxonomic science—did not match any coffee snake in their collection.

To this day, the supposed specimen has never surfaced, says Cisneros, who informed Ecuador’s Environment Ministry of the discrepancy. The museum filed a second complaint last year when it learned Arteaga said he had collected the lizards he wanted to deposit at the Quito Vivarium under a permit granted in collaboration with USFQ. That couldn’t be true, museum staff wrote, because they ended that collaboration with Arteaga in 2023.

I realized far too late how far he was willing to go.

• Juan Guayasamín
• University of San Francisco de Quito

The third episode involves a paper Arteaga published in Evolutionary Systematics in 2024 that received substantial press attention. It describes five new species of eyelash vipers, venomous snakes found in Central and South America that are known for their bright colors and the unusual, lashlike scales above their eyes. The paper nearly doubled the number of known species of eyelash vipers. But it relied heavily on analyses of mitochondrial DNA, a technique many researchers say can’t reliably differentiate closely related species. If similar DNA methods were applied to humans, asserts herpetologist William Lamar of the University of Texas (UT) at Tyler, “our parents and grandparents would be considered new species of Homo sapiens.”

Concerns about the paper’s methods led Jacobo Reyes-Velasco, an independent herpetologist, to reanalyze the data and, in October 2024, he published paper in Herpetozoa questioning the new species. He and others criticized the paper for contributing to a problem known as taxonomic inflation—the splitting of known species into many potentially questionable new species. The problem not only pollutes the scientific literature and creates disorder in national biodiversity inventories, researchers say, but also means scientists must spend additional time and scarce funding on trying to correct the record.

The concerns aren’t just scholarly, the critics add. Taxonomic inflation can lead to the waste of conservation funds by making some species appear to be rare or endangered, when they are actually part of a larger, healthier population. It can even have dire consequences for people bitten by venomous snakes. Medical workers treating snakebite victims must match the antivenom to a specific species, so confusion about which species a snake belongs to could lead to a fatal mismatch.

Given such real-world implications, using disputed methods to identify new species “is disappointing,” says David Hillis, an evolutionary biologist at UT Austin who has criticized what he sees as the overuse of mitochondrial DNA methods to identify new reptile and amphibian species. “People seem to want to call attention to their studies by creating new names.”

Arteaga accepts responsibility for some missteps. He admits he didn’t follow the correct specimen numbering procedures in publishing the coffee snakes paper, for example. And he concedes that the mitochondrial DNA study of eyelash vipers “isn’t perfect, the interpretations aren’t perfect.” But he notes the method is low cost, making it accessible to researchers in a resource-limited country such as Ecuador, and he is pleased it has drawn attention to the snakes.

In the Quito Vivarium case, he blames the dispute on an administrative technicality but regrets having broken ties with Barragán, one of the few curators in Ecuador with whom he still had a good relationship. And he blames long-established herpetologists in Ecuador for many of his troubles, alleging they want to “neutralize” his career. He considers himself a “rebel,” he says, struggling against scientists who are more interested in burnishing their own résumés than describing and saving biodiversity. He says some museum curators he worked with early in his career demanded he add their names to papers describing new species in return for giving him access to their collections, even if they didn’t contribute to the research. “They make excuses [for blocking access] until they are offered co-authorship,” he says.

Tensions between researchers and curators have long existed in Ecuador, say researchers who work there. But “most biologists in Ecuador have good relationships with each other, we’re professionals,” says herpetologist Juan Guayasamín, who became a mentor and close friend of Arteaga over the past decade. But Arteaga, he says, became convinced curators and colleagues were trying to undermine his career.

For his part, Arteaga sees some of his permit issues, such as his failure to provide the full paperwork for some specimens, as a form of resistance. “It’s my way of expressing my disagreement with how things are done,” he says, asserting that such bureaucratic “formalities … hold back the progress of science” and unnecessarily complicate conservation efforts. He hopes his stance will catalyze discussion among herpetologists about what their priorities should be. In the meantime, “I’m not going to bend,” he vows, even if it means facing sanctions from government agencies or academic institutions in Ecuador. “If I’m the first head to fall … so be it.”

And he dismisses concerns that he is contributing to taxonomic inflation. “It might sound trivial,” Arteaga says, but naming a new species “makes it easier for me and for conservation organizations to obtain the resources to protect that species.” Several frog species he has described, for example, were later recognized as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, often an important step toward receiving help.

Arteaga’s actions have not played well with other researchers. Many have distanced themselves, in part because of concerns that Arteaga’s troubles could damage their own careers. “He is isolating himself,” Guayasamín says.

For Guayasamín, who mentored Arteaga for years after he was banned from PUCE and worked with him at Tropical Herping, the 2023 coffee snakes controversy marked a breaking point. Guayasamín says he first developed concerns about Arteaga’s behavior while working with him on a field guide to the Galápagos Islands that was published in 2019. At the time, he blamed any problems on youthful enthusiasm and inexperience. But the coffee snakes episode made him reconsider—and cut ties. “I realized far too late how far he was willing to go,” Guayasamín says. “Alejandro doesn’t understand that doing science means following the basic rules of the game. It’s as if he lives in a parallel reality.”

Arteaga was left with few defenders in late 2024, when he unveiled his plan to auction off naming rights to new species to help finance his nonprofit discovery fund. The fund, launched with Rosalía Arteaga, a former president of Ecuador who is also Arteaga’s great aunt, aims to raise $10 million to support 100 taxonomists under age 35. The researchers would get grants of $2000 to $10,000 to help them discover new species around the world.

Arteaga notes that other organizations in Ecuador, including Ecominga, have benefited from similar fundraisers. Other researchers, however, had deep reservations. Lamar, for example, says although finding funding for taxonomy is a problem, “dropping questionably justified honorifics on the rich and famous is an unwise way to combat this.”

Such objections ultimately persuaded Arteaga to drop the idea. “The Latin American taxonomic community is not ready for this,” he says. Instead, the website now promises that donors will be acknowledged in any resulting publication, press release, or documentary and may have a species named after them “at the sole discretion of the authors.”

Still, he sees the retreat as a missed opportunity. Funding for taxonomy and conservation in Ecuador “is a joke,” he says, and naming auctions could help fill the gap. “It’s that,” he says, “or the species isn’t described and it isn’t saved.”

Some of Arteaga’s former colleagues, however, see such bleak predictions as self-serving—and counterproductive. Research advances through collaboration, and “science and conservation always go hand in hand,” Guayasamín says. But “if one loses credibility, the entire structure falls.”

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From ScienceMag:

“I’ll be working on the final figures for the review paper tomorrow,” Yunqing Jian emailed her adviser. But the 33-year-old postdoc in the molecular plant-microbe interaction (MPMI) laboratory at the University of Michigan (UM), run by Libo Shan and her husband, Ping He, never got the chance. The next day, 3 June 2025, she was arrested by FBI and charged with improperly transporting biological materials in an alleged conspiracy involving her ex-boyfriend, Zunyong Liu, a former postdoc in the MPMI lab.

Jian would be the first in a cluster of Chinese postdocs at UM and Indiana University (IU) arrested over the next 5 months for actions the U.S. government claims posed an imminent threat to national security. The U.S. attorney in the Jian case, Jerome Gorgon, called the material the pair were accused of smuggling—a well-studied strain of a fungus, already found in the United States, that attacks wheat—a “potential agroterrorism weapon.”

The other cases triggered similar dire warnings from high-ranking federal officials. Then–Attorney General Pamela Bondi said Chengxuan Han, who shipped samples of Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny worm used as a model organism by neurobiologists around the world, to UM, was “attempting to smuggle biological materials under the guise of research, [which] is a serious crime that threatens America’s national and agricultural security.” And after IU postdoc Youhuang Xiang was arrested for receiving a shipment of plasmids—circles of DNA often used to genetically engineer organisms—derived from Escherichia coli, a ubiquitous microbe, FBI Director Kash Patel warned that “if not properly controlled, [these] biological materials could inflict devastating disease to U.S. crops and cause significant financial loss to the U.S. economy.”

The UM and IU cases resulted in four convictions of Chinese postdocs. Six of the seven scientists charged were also deported, a step made easier by their status as foreign nationals on temporary visas. (Liu, the seventh, was already in China.) For these postdocs, deportation is essentially a permanent ban on returning to the U.S. and an end to their dream of contributing to the U.S. research enterprise.

The prosecutions have also disrupted the lives of the senior scientists who employed them. One, neurobiologist X.Z. “Shawn” Xu, has left Michigan and moved his lab to China. Shan and He, both U.S. citizens, were investigated before being cleared. And IU’s Roger Innes, a plant molecular biologist who supervised Xiang, has been locked out of his lab because of an ongoing federal investigation and, along with a colleague, blocked from exchanging research materials with outside collaborators.

The impact of the prosecutions has rippled across both campuses, with some scientists calling them racially biased and an overreaction to minor infractions. “It’s had a chilling effect on both faculty and students,” says cell biologist Dawen Cai, co-president of the University of Michigan Association of Chinese Professors.

The chair of Shan’s department, biologist Ken Cadigan, says some of his colleagues fear the worst. “Even if I’m a U.S. citizen, they can take that away and deport me if I make one small mistake,” he says he’s hearing in the hallways.

Elements of the prosecutions are reminiscent of the China Initiative, which the Department of Justice (DOJ) launched during President Donald Trump’s first term to root out economic espionage by the Chinese government. It led to the arrest of some two dozen senior Chinese-born scientists at U.S. institutions who were alleged to have failed to disclose their ties to Chinese entities. The government lost or dropped many of those cases, however, and in 2022 then-President Joe Biden officially ended the program after widespread complaints that it had unfairly targeted scientists of Chinese descent, most of whom were U.S. citizens.

A different demographic—Chinese postdocs on temporary visas—has become the latest target of DOJ investigations. And the Trump administration and Republican members of Congress have now singled out mislabeling of biological materials as a threat to national security as serious as economic espionage. In a letter to the UM president shortly after the June 2025 arrests of Jian and Han, the chairmen of three committees in the U.S. House of Representatives wrote: “Chinese researchers tied to the PRC [People’s Republic of China] defense research and industrial base have no business participating in U.S. taxpayer-funded research with clear national security implications—especially those related to dangerous biological materials.”

Prosecuting cases of alleged mishandling of biological materials is a big change for DOJ, says Michael German, former FBI special agent and national security expert. “That is typically not something the government cares very much about unless it involves a dangerous pathogen,” German says.

They are getting the clear message that the government doesn’t want them to be here.

• Roger Innes
• Indiana University Bloomington

Biological samples are an appealing target for prosecutors, German and lawyers for the defendants say, because laypeople assume all such material is potentially threatening. “In this particular case, we’re talking about plasmid DNA of E. coli bacteria,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Rinka said at Xiang’s 7 April plea and sentencing hearing. “In the next case, we may very well be talking about something that is harmful, such as anthrax or a strain of some fungus that has never been in the United States.”

Scientists and others familiar with the cases agree that the government needs to enforce existing rules on labeling and shipping biological materials. But prosecuting seemingly minor violations of those rules as felonies criminalizes the routine practice of sharing samples and resources with colleagues, they add. That crackdown is especially hard on foreign scientists, who are likely to request or bring materials from home because they don’t know what materials will be available in their new U.S. labs, Innes says.

Those from China are especially vulnerable, Innes notes, because of the heightened political and economic tensions between the two countries. “Even though it’s perfectly legal to ship or import something like plasmid DNA if you properly label the package,” Innes explains, Customs and Border Protection [CBP] “agents will probably confiscate it because they don’t trust any kind of biological material coming from China or another country of concern.”

Although federal criminal investigations involve a large team from multiple government agencies, the UM and IU cases drew heavily on the work of one person: FBI Special Agent Edward Nieh. Assigned to the Detroit field office of FBI’s counterintelligence division, Nieh played a role in all the arrests—and was directly involved in the cases of Jian and Han. Science has reconstructed his role by drawing on his affidavits to the court; FBI declined to make him available for an interview.

Jian became a target after her former lab mate Liu was stopped by CBP at the Detroit airport on 27 July 2024, when he arrived on a flight from Shanghai. Liu, a new assistant professor at Zhejiang University, a top-tier Chinese university, was taking a working vacation, according to David Duncan, Jian’s lawyer—visiting her and hoping to use the fluorescence microscope at MPMI to study samples of the wheat-blight fungus Fusarium graminearum (Fg) he had brought with him. “It was pretty clear this was a workaholic scientist who didn’t want to leave his work behind, and so he brought it with him in his suitcase,” Duncan says.

Liu was refused entry into the U.S. and immediately sent back to China, thus avoiding prosecution. But FBI confiscated his phone, which contained exchanges that implicated Jian. Among the information Nieh gleaned was that Jian hid undeclared research material in her shoe when she came to the U.S. in August 2022 to work with Shan and He, who were then at Texas A&M University before moving to UM a year later.

On 5 February 2025, Nieh interviewed Jian and then took her phone, on which FBI found a year-old conversation in which Jian, now at UM, asked another scientist at Zhejiang to send her some plasmids. That material had been seized and destroyed by U.S. customs officials.

Facing such evidence, Jian agreed to plead guilty to smuggling biological material and making false statements during her interrogation. On 12 November 2025, after 5 months in jail, she was sentenced to time served and, within a few days, deported.

“Dr. Jian acted illegally,” Duncan conceded during her sentencing hearing. “But her motive … was to speed up her research and help her boyfriend speed up his research,” he added. “Throughout their career, their goal has been to protect crops from these fungi, not spread it.”

Before Jian was sentenced, Duncan solicited a letter from Innes in which he explained that the material Liu had brought with him posed no threat to Michigan farmers or the public, noting it is already present in the state. “Notably, this strain was originally collected from a grain elevator in Michigan in 1996 … and is ubiquitous in the state, which is why farmers spend so much money trying to control it,” Innes wrote in his letter, which became part of the public record.

Jian’s conviction accelerated FBI’s investigation of Xiang. One week after she was sentenced, FBI’s Detroit office notified the Indianapolis office it had come across “shipments from the PRC to individuals at IU whose research focused on pathogen resistance and susceptibility in wheat, the same as that of [Jian and Liu].” In particular, FBI discovered that Xiang had received samples of plasmid DNA in March 2024 from the Chinese Academy of Sciences as part of a shipment from the “Guangzhou Sci Tech Innovation Trading” company labeled as “women’s underwear.”

Innes believes his letter in support of Jian and Liu was what drew scrutiny to his postdoc, and Duncan agrees. “Why would Innes be on the Michigan FBI’s radar, except for that letter?” says Duncan, who has decades of experience defending defendants in federal court. “There’s no other connection.”

[The prosecutions] had a chilling effect on both faculty and students.

• Dawen Cai
• University of Michigan Association of Chinese Professors

Nieh says in the charging document he learned that Xiang would be flying into Chicago on 23 November 2025 after a 2-month stint at a U.K. agricultural research station outside London, whose scientists collaborate with Innes. U.S. law enforcement officials interrogated Xiang upon his arrival and, after questioning him, arrested and charged him with making false statements.

The U.S. government immediately revoked Xiang’s immigrant visa, meaning he was in the country illegally. Posting bail would have likely triggered his rearrest and reincarceration by the Department of Homeland Security for an indefinite period. So Xiang declined to post bail and endured a 4-month odyssey through five U.S. jails and detention facilities while his lawyers negotiated with DOJ officials. On 7 April, Xiang pleaded guilty to one count of smuggling plasmid DNA and was sentenced to time served. He served another 11 days in an Indiana county jail before being deported back to China.

Rinka said he hoped the conviction would send a message to all academic scientists. “Once again, it is not for the faculty of any higher educational institution to determine what may or may not be brought to the United States at their whim and fancy,” Rinka argued.

Nieh’s pursuit of undeclared samples also ensnared Han, whom her lawyer describes as a “nerdy, kind, and polite academic.”

Han, who was close to completing her doctoral degree in neurophysiology from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), was set to begin a 1-year stint at UM as a visiting scientist in Shawn Xu’s laboratory in August 2025. In the year before starting work there, she had shipped at least five packages containing C. elegans and plasmid DNA to three Chinese postdocs in the lab without proper labeling, according to records Nieh obtained from CBP, which had confiscated the packages.

In March 2025, CBP officers contacted one intended recipient, postdoc Xu Bai. Although Xu declined to speak or meet with them, on 8 June Nieh interviewed two other postdocs from the lab, Fengfan Zhang and Zhiyong Zhang, as they were waiting at the Detroit airport to pick up Han, their future colleague. Han was detained as soon as her plane landed and, after a lengthy interrogation, taken into custody and charged with smuggling, conspiracy, and making false statements.

Instead of collecting more data for her dissertation on how organisms process and respond to sensory cues, Han found herself behind bars. “Her career has been irreparably damaged,” her lawyer, Benton Martin, told U.S. District Judge Matthew Leitman on 10 September 2025 before he found her guilty of smuggling material. “She has lost her prestigious research opportunity at the University of Michigan … and in all likelihood the chance to become a professor in China, which requires international research experience.” Han was sentenced to the 3 months she had already served in jail and then deported.

In press statements about the June 2025 arrests of Jian and Han, DOJ officials suggested they were part of a concerted effort by the Chinese government to infiltrate U.S. universities. Within days, the three House committee chairs had amplified that message in a stern, 10-page letter to interim UM President Domenico Grasso. They called for a “full review of all grants to MPMI” for possible violations of any federal statutes or regulations. The chairmen sent a nearly identical letter to the heads of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which have funded Shan and He.

Science has been unable to determine the status or outcome of those investigations. A spokesperson for the House committees said, “We don’t have any updates for you,” and spokespeople for NIH and NSF declined comment. A UM spokesperson also declined comment, although Science has learned that the House letter triggered the university investigation of Jian’s mentors, Shan and He.

The three postdocs in Shawn Xu’s lab were fired shortly after they declined to meet with UM lawyers on 29 September 2025. “They said they had been told by their academic adviser [in China] not to talk to anyone,” says attorney John Minock, who represented Xu Bai. “And when I asked them how responsible for their academic careers that person was, they laughed and said, ‘100%.’ So, it was essentially an order.”

Their J-1 visas were revoked soon after they were fired, which meant they were in the country illegally and subject to arrest and deportation. Nieh told the court he learned the three men had booked a flight to China on 16 October 2025 from John F. Kennedy International Airport and apprehended them there.

But on 4 February, after nearly 4 months in jail, they were released and allowed to fly home. According to their lawyers and several media reports, the Chinese embassy had intervened and struck a deal with the Trump administration to make the charges go away. “We never knew why, or who initiated it,” Minock says.

The U.S. government still gets credit “for arresting and deporting the scientists,” Minock notes, which he says is “an important goal for this administration.” But the episode was costly to U.S. taxpayers. “They had been confined for more than 3 months,” Minock says, “and the government probably spent $200,000 or $300,000 over the course of the prosecution before the cases were dropped.”

German argues the prosecutions have other costs as well. “Amplifying these cases into an alleged threat to national security reinforces the stereotype and the impression that there is this concerted activity, especially if you’re focusing on one particular racial or ethnic group or one particular nation.”

FBI and DOJ officials say they are simply doing their jobs. “The FBI remains resolutely committed to collaborating with our law enforcement partners to protect the residents of Michigan and defend the United States against such grave threats,” said Cheyvoryea Gibson, special agent in charge of the FBI Detroit field office, after Jian was arrested.

Although never charged with a crime, the mentors of these postdocs have also suffered. Shan says Jian’s departure has forced her lab to delay publishing important findings. Shan and He also face lengthy questioning at the airport every time they return from a scientific meeting abroad.

For Shawn Xu, the pall of suspicion hanging over his UM lab was dark enough for him to relocate to China “rather than wait for the noose to tighten,” according to Minock. He is reportedly now working at HUST and his students and postdocs still at UM have received short-term support from the university as they scramble to find other advisers.

Innes, who last year was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, has been outspoken in defense of his colleagues of Chinese ancestry, who he says are lying low. But Innes has also paid a price, including restrictions on his research activities and the cancellation of a long-running project.

The day after Xiang was sentenced, Innes received an email from the head of IU’s public safety office ordering him and a departmental colleague “to cease all importing and exporting activities in connection with your research, effective immediately and until further notice.” The office head acknowledged the unusual directive was “inconvenient and less than ideal during the academic year,” but said it was necessary so IU “could respond to inquiries” from federal regulators “regarding IU’s policies and procedures in connection with the import and export of certain biological materials.”

Innes also faces an ongoing government investigation. In December 2025, FBI agents searched his lab and office in the presence of IU lawyers and confiscated a notebook containing seeds of Arabidopsis thaliana, the model organism he uses to study Fusarium head blight.

“There was some Chinese writing in the notebook, which is probably why they took it,” says Innes, who received the seed packet in 2018 from a colleague in China and never opened it.

On 3 February, Innes received a letter from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) saying his lab “is in compliance” with government regulations. But the next month, USDA canceled a long-running collaboration between its scientists and Innes’s lab. Ironically, the work involves finding better ways of helping plants build resistance against the Fusarium fungus. “And now that experiment will never be finished,” Innes notes.

And 3 weeks after Xiang was sentenced, USDA told Innes it had sent the letter “in error.” On 7 May, the university locked him out of his lab. “We have been notified by the US Department of Agriculture that they will be engaging in activity in a laboratory associated with the biology department,” wrote Russell Mumper, vice president for research, in an email obtained by Science.

USDA declined a request for comment.

Many congressional Republicans have urged the Trump administration to resurrect the China Initiative, seeing a continuing threat. In the wake of these convictions and deportations, those affected wonder whether DOJ has revived it in a new form. “Yeah, it seems so,” says Duncan, who represented Jian. “And postdocs are easier targets than the more senior scientists, most of whom are U.S. citizens.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests the prosecutions are causing more Chinese grad students and postdocs to question whether they want to come to the U.S. to further their scientific careers. “I’ve heard from [my UM] colleagues that top candidates are declining offers and choosing to go instead to the U.K. or Europe or Singapore,” Cai says.

There are no numbers to support the anecdotes, as UM does not break out student totals by country and posts no data on postdocs. And Cai says his colleagues feel UM “is a safer place” than most U.S. universities at the moment because of its continued vocal support for international collaborations.

But Innes worries about the broader environment. “Most Chinese scientists came to the U.S. with the hope of staying for their careers,” he says. “But now they are getting the clear message that the government doesn’t want them to be here.”

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From ScienceMag:

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Some parts of graduate school have kept up with the times. Campuses modernize; hybrid learning abounds; and according to a Microsoft plugin I don’t remember installing, artificial intelligence is making everything better and we should all yield to its whims.

But some parts of grad school feel like they haven’t changed in decades or even centuries, and I’m not just talking about your stipend. There’s one particular part of grad school that has always felt downright, for lack of a better word, medieval. It’s a ritual you could picture happening in the halls of whatever passed for academia in dimly lit stone chambers, with everyone in heavy robes. And still, to this day, it’s fairly universal: the oral exam.

Some programs call them comps, or quals. At my school, we called them GBOs, graduate board orals, and they essentially constituted the dividing line between being given the thumbs-up to continue toward your Ph.D. after your first 2 years of course work and lab work or being asked to kindly slink toward the exit and pursue a career in the humanities.

Actually, there was a third option: “pass with conditions,” which—depending on the conditions—could be a sliver away from an unconditional pass, or potentially worse than a fail. I knew one student whose conditions required her to take a year’s worth of undergraduate chemistry courses that were probably, because of our university’s high concentration of overachieving premeds, much more rigorous than any graduate course. Another student had to meet with a committee member weekly for one-on-one review sessions. You might think the latter is easier than the former. But apparently, that professor was repeatedly unavailable during the time slots when he had scheduled the review sessions, leaving his student to wonder how she could fulfill the requirement he had created and then made impossible.

With all that at stake, it’s no surprise these exams are scary. And it doesn’t help that there’s a good chance you’ve never taken a test before in this type of format, standing in front of a panel of relaxed-looking professors and lecturing about science as if you’re a budding expert in your field, not a nervous grad student, answering questions spontaneously and competently—no “I’ll come back to this later” and flipping to the next page, no avoiding live, immediate judgment. Adding further to the pain, many scientists are introverts who chose this field precisely because they want to minimize human interaction.

If you find yourself freaking out because your school is forcing you to participate in the least entertaining type of performance art, hopefully you’ll find the following advice helpful.

Study efficiently and effectively.

Well, duh. Of course you should do this. But what makes studying effective? For me, I knew I would not only have to learn the material, but also train myself to recite and apply it out loud. And the only way to do that would be to understand it backward and forward. So I started a month in advance with a stack of blank paper, and I started to make study guides—vocabulary, chemical structures and mechanisms, graphs. Writing out the study guides forced me to relearn the material, and studying them reinforced it. Then I would hide them and see whether I could explain the same thing, out loud, to an imaginary thesis committee. The imaginary committee was very forgiving.

Study what the committee is likely to ask.

This is challenging, because they can literally ask you questions about all of science. But don’t try to study all of science. You already know they will probably ask about your specific research project, so start there. Know your project well. Read and understand the most important papers and reviews. Then broaden your reach: Study the fields that pertain to your research. I worked on the binding kinetics of particular enzymes in the parasite that causes malaria, so I reviewed the basics of kinetics, the basics of malaria, and the scientific principles behind all of the machines and assays I used in the lab. Think like your committee: If you were assessing a Ph.D. candidate who measured one kind of kinetics every day, wouldn’t it be logical to ask them about different kinds of kinetics? I must have reread the kinetics chapter of my biochemistry textbook a dozen times to prepare for my exam, and guess what, the committee asked me a bunch of questions about kinetics.

Seed your studying with a zinger or two.

It’s impossible to predict all possible questions your committee might ask. But you can keep an eye open for a few, and prepare accordingly. For me, that approach happened to pay off. Without going into too much detail, almost all the enzymes I worked with were aspartic proteases, which are a pretty standard kind of enzyme, and it’s well-known how they work. But one was a histo-aspartic protease, which was so rare that the name of the enzyme was literally “histo-aspartic protease,” and no one knew its mechanism. It occurred to me while studying that a clever question might be to ask me to draw out how a histo-aspartic protease might work, in theory, from basic chemical principles. I will readily confess that I could not have figured this out on the spot—but I didn’t need to, because I figured it out in advance and then memorized the answer. Sure enough, my committee asked me that exact question, and I had to hide my glee when I pretended to think for a moment, then wrote the answer perfectly. “Maybe … like this?” I said, while thinking, “Damn right it’s like this.”

But don’t neglect the basic basics.

Somehow, in my studying, I had assumed I would just kind of remember all of organic chemistry. Oops. At one point, my committee asked me to draw a molecule and show them where the resonance could be found. That’s, like, week one stuff in organic chemistry. But week one was 4 years earlier, and I totally blanked. I only remembered that “resonance equals dotted lines,” and I think I drew some dotted lines.

Choose your committee wisely.

You might think your committee should consist of professors in your exact field. And you should definitely include some of those if you can. But there’s another criterion that I think people often forget: You should ensure that your committee includes nice people. We had one professor in my department who probably conducted more orals than anyone else, not because his knowledge extended into their fields, but because he was a nice, forgiving guy who didn’t try to trip anyone up. Conversely, we had another professor who was young and untenured, and rumor had it that he would always try to find fault with students as a way to prove his own worth to the other committee members. The makeup of your committee can truly mean the difference between a positive experience and a nightmare, a pass and a fail. It may seem arbitrary and unfair, but that’s only because it’s arbitrary and unfair.

Don’t get discouraged.

One of the hardest facts for me to accept was that the committee’s job is to find the limits of your knowledge. If they only ask you questions that you can easily answer, they won’t know what you really know. Practically, this means they may ask a question, see the relief on your face as you start to confidently respond, and then immediately switch to a different topic. It also means they will end up asking you a bunch of questions that will baffle you and make you think you should have chosen a different field. It means you will end your orals believing you failed, and why not, because there’s so much you don’t know.

That’s how I felt exiting that room. I finished my 90-minute grilling and entered the hallway, ready to collapse. My lab mate was waiting there to hand me a beer, a little tradition in our lab. His congratulations felt bittersweet because I knew, knew, I had screwed up. At best, I would pass with conditions, and I just had to hope those conditions would be reasonable.

Then the door opened, and one by one, the committee members exited and shook my hand. Even then, I still thought they were going to deliver bad news. When they started to walk out of the building, I wondered whether I should schedule a second session to review what I assumed would be some pretty onerous conditions.

But no. I passed unconditionally, though the committee did note—correctly—that I should probably take some time to rereview organic chemistry.

As I stood there in the hallway, holding my laptop and the bottle of beer, I just kept thinking I should have failed. Toward the end, I had answered so many questions with a deflated “I don’t know.” There was just so much I didn’t know.

Of course, there was so much I didn’t know. Yet.

That’s why I was here.

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From ScienceMag:

Shirley Meng grew up in China and earned her degrees in Singapore, but the United States is where she built her career trying to make better and cheaper batteries for a power-hungry world. After 2 decades here, the University of Chicago (UChicago) materials scientist, who also heads a Department of Energy (DOE) research hub, is now heading back to Asia.

On 1 July, Meng will become vice president for innovation and global affairs at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), her undergraduate alma mater and a growing research powerhouse. Only 35 years old, NTU was ranked 12th this year in one global assessment of research universities—one rung above UChicago.

Meng took the job because she thinks the U.S. has turned away from a commitment to decarbonize its economy. She’s leaving with mixed emotions—and the hope that the political environment for more sustainable energy sources will improve once President Donald Trump leaves office.

In making the move, Meng is also stepping down as director of the $62 million Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA) based at Argonne National Laboratory, one of two DOE battery hubs launched in the waning months of former President Joe Biden’s administration. ESRA has not had its funding reduced, and Meng says the hub’s focus on using artificial intelligence in designing next-generation batteries appeals to the White House. Even so, she says, “The last 15 months have been extraordinarily difficult for the energy storage field, with many important projects being sidelined.”

The Trump administration’s immigration policies, including its restrictions on Chinese-born scientists, are another factor in her decision to move to NTU. “I’ve always been an internationalist,” says Meng, who became a Singapore citizen in 2004, “and I think that Singapore is a place where people can collaborate, regardless of what country you come from.”

Meng joined the UChicago faculty in 2022 after spending more than a decade at the University of California San Diego, where her husband, Graham Elliott, is a professor of econometrics. UChicago “has given me 2 years to decide” whether to return or sever ties to the institution, she says. “If things start moving in the right direction—and my family wants me to come back—I hope I can do it.”

In the meantime, she says, she will maintain a partial appointment at UChicago and continue to run her lab, which recently developed the first anode-free sodium solid-state battery, an alternative to lithium batteries that could allow more affordable and faster charging of electric vehicles.

Meng spoke with Science this week after NTU issued a press release about her new post on 22 April—Earth Day, as she notes. Here are excerpts from that conversation.

Q: What made the NTU offer so attractive?

A: I was really searching for a position that would let me do my work, which is to translate the fundamental science into industry impact. I’ve been entrusted with a very high position in my home country, but at the same time, I’m seriously concerned that, if I were asked by the [U.S.] Department of War to perform certain tasks, I probably won’t be able to do it. Things like [making better batteries for] drones, or humanoids for war fighting. Maybe they already have their own expertise. But I just don’t want to risk it.

I also think it’s important that I maintain my reputation as someone who’s always building things, not destroying things. So, I decided it’s probably better for somebody else to [direct the DOE hub].

Q: How has the increasingly tense U.S.-Chinese relationship affected you?

A: I’m not a big fan of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. So I had no hesitation about giving up my Chinese citizenship. But I think a lot of my frustration in the last 2 years is the lack of differentiation in discussions about U.S. relationships with China. The word Chinese is being mixed up with race, nationality, and culture, and it’s been extremely tiring to deal with that situation.

Q: What is the situation for foreign-born scientists hoping to work at Argonne and other DOE national labs?

A: I think it’s important for the nation to impose strict [security] controls on the labs. So I’m not complaining. But it also creates difficulties for students from certain nationalities.

As long as they can get a visa and get through the paperwork, it is OK. But it’s not easy to go through all the checkpoints. There was a postdoc from [South] Korea we wanted to hire. But we would have had to pay $100,000 because he needed to come in on an H-1B visa, and nobody understands the rules and where the money would come from. So, in the end we just had to say no.

Another student who is funded by Tesla was told they cannot work [at Argonne]. And when I asked why, I was told the reason is that Tesla has a China operation. I wanted to say, “What international company does not do business in China?”

Q: How are these tensions playing out within DOE’s Office of Science, which is funding the battery hub?

A: I think the DOE managers do a fantastic job. For 18 years, program managers have watched me grow up and mature into a senior scientist, and I’m very grateful for all the support DOE has given me. But they are also caught up in this current situation, and they have been told not to talk about it.

Q: How do you feel about this administration’s emphasis on fossil fuels and tariffs?

A: The leaders of industry know that we need to decarbonize our economy. They also understand that the world has to work together, and that globalization is unstoppable. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has been moving in the other direction. I was in Saudi Arabia this winter [on a delegation led by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright], and the Saudi energy minister took me aside at one point and said, “You know, your [energy] secretary is more pro-oil than me.”

Q: Is there a way for scientists to mitigate the strained relationship between the two countries?

A: We are now in this perpetual cycle of doubt and distrust. A lot of Chinese scientists benefited from the U.S. system in the past 2 decades, and they have gone back to Asia and become very successful. That’s great. But I wish they would show a little bit more gratitude for what America has done for them. I think that would help ease tensions on both sides.

Q: How will you carry out your responsibilities at NTU while maintaining your lab in Chicago?

A: I learned that 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. was working time between Singapore and MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] when I was part of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology [a collaboration begun in the early 2000s] while getting my Ph.D. I’m a lot older now [Meng turns 50 in October], but I think I can survive again on that schedule.”

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