The grey area here is from lack of foundational knowledge surrounding these cells, and your assumptions aren’t useful (nor are they likely, I suspect, to hold). For example, we have no idea if these cells were originally provided to the lab under an MTA, nor any restrictions placed by the funding source.
> Keeping them is just like me keeping my notebooks when I move, even if I haven't finished solving the equations therein.
This is not a grey area: lab notebooks and lab data are generally speaking the property of the lab. The proper procedure is to request permission to create a copy of them when you move to a new institution. Check your university’s IP policy, it should be the governing rule set.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I've written extensively about it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19404162
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200971
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195089
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741930
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20720787
Skew is inevitable on certain issues given that HN demographics are (though highly international) mostly Western. But that doesn't mean that people get to post slurs or use the site for nationalistic flamewar.
1. The stolen material by these Chinese scientists were worthless and akin to a student taking home a notebook after a lecture. 2. The real issue is here is not of the rampant theft of intellectual property by rogue Chinese scientists, but that Westerners are disgusted by the mere thought of Chinese people learning science.
I didn't need to learn your name ('Zhou') to see that you are another CCP loyalist. And honestly I am quite concerned that a visiting Chinese scientist like yourself holds sympathetic views of these intellectual theft crimes by your countrymen.....
We've banned this account for that, as well as for doing nationalistic flamewar and ignoring our request to stop.
Biomedical patents are not trivial software patents. Billions of dollars of investment goes into developing a single new therapy. The molecular structure of medicine can often be easily replicated once discovered, so patents are a key part of commercializing new medicine and techniques. (See the CRISPR-Cas9 patent debacle.) Taking the right to patent some work away from the institute it was developed at means theft of the licensing fees derived from the patent, and an impact on an institute's ability to keep funding R&D.
Most universities have a “tech transfer” office that helps with this (the university usually gets a share) and tries to find licensees.
With that background, the morality of "smuggling" these cells is a bit of a gray area. On one hand, they're just incomplete work that the student wants to finish elsewhere. Keeping them is just like me keeping my notebooks when I move, even if I haven't finished solving the equations therein. On the other hand, if the project is finished elsewhere, credit won't properly flow to the affiliation where the work was started. In theoretical physics, we really don't care about this (I just finished a project where 2 members changed affiliation midway through), but in biology there's the cost of facilities, and the local expertise that gets you the raw materials.
So there is an issue here, but I certainly don't think it's worth the hysteria that will unfold in this comments section. I think the real issue is that a lot of people on this site are disgusted at the idea of Chinese people learning science. But to us scientists, the spread of knowledge is a virtue. After all, the end goal of this student would have been to publish in a journal -- which people from any country can access.