日中関係

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A second potentially serious economic espionage case came to light on May 9, 2001, when a federal grand jury indicted two Japanese scientists and charged them with numerous offenses, including stealing Alzheimer’s disease cells and genetic materials from the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Cleveland, Ohio, then hiding and passing them to a research institute in Japan.

The two men were identified as Takashi Okamoto and Hiroaki Serizawa. Serizawa, a Japanese citizen and permanent US resident, was arrested by the FBI on May 3 in Kansas City, Kansas. Okamoto, also a Japanese citizen and a former US resident, is in Japan, and the US Government is believed to be seeking his extradition. He headed the Lerner Research Institute, an Alzheimer’s laboratory at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.

According to the indictment, Okamoto and Serizawa met and grew close in the mid-1990s while working in Boston. Okamoto left his post at Harvard to take his research program on Alzheimer's disease to the Lerner Research Institute. Serizawa moved to an institution in Kansas City.

Okamoto then accepted a job offer in April 1999 to relocate his research program to the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Saitama-Ken, Japan. Around midnight on July 8, Okamoto and a co-conspirator allegedly raided their own Cleveland Clinic laboratory, stole cells and other materials, destroyed much of what they did not take, then sought to cover up their actions.

Okamoto then shipped the biological materials to Serizawa in Kansas City for storage, then eventually transferred them to Japan. Okamoto resigned a few weeks later and started work in Japan in August.

Serizawa and Okamoto will be prosecuted under several laws, including the Economic Espionage Act, enacted by Congress in 1996 to stem the flow of secrets from US companies and laboratories to overseas competitors.

Serizawa pleaded not guilty on May 16 and the first hearing of his trial will be July 23. Okamoto has denied any wrongdoing.

[NCIX]