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CONTINUING FALLOUT FROM CHINESE ESPIONAGE SCANDAL
The controversy surrounding Wen Ho Lee, the naturalized US citizen physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who has been accused of keeping lab secrets on his home computer, has had the effect many feared it would.  No student of Chinese ethnicity, whether from the US, mainland China or Taiwan has applied for a postdoctoral fellowship position at the lab. 
According to the director of the lab, Jon Browne, in a normal year there would be about 10 finalists for such positions, of whom about 4 or 5 would be ethnic Chinese.  This year, not only were there no Chinese is the pool of finalists, there were very few ethnic Chinese who applied at all.  Browne said the reason for this is that Chinese students feel they “are being told, ‘Don’t come to Los Alamos.’” 
Officials at all national laboratories, as well as within the Department of Energy, have been worried for some time about the results of the Lee investigation.  Scientists of Asian descent, regardless of their immigration status, have reported that they are no longer comfortable working in the labs.  At a recent symposium where the current tensions were discussed, many speakers talked of their own experiences since the release of the Cox Report last spring, the congressional document that initially accursed Lee of espionage. 
One speaker, Wen Hsu, a US citizen and physicist at Sandia National Laboratory, told of experiences that have become too common in recent months.  He spoke of briefings on new security measures at which Lee was repeatedly compared to convicted spies.  These hearings occurred before Lee was indicted in December (he has not been indicted on espionage charges).  He also told of truck drivers at the lab who would yell at him comments like “How many secrets did you steal today?” 
Part of the problem seems to be caused by regulations that require lab employees to report “close and continuing contact” with people from certain countries, including Taiwan and mainland China.  There was for some time confusion as to whether this applied to naturalized citizens.  While it doesn’t, it has caused and continues to cause problems.  At the symposium, one woman spoke of taking her child to a birthday party and being asked by the host if she was a citizen.  The host said that if she were not, the host would have to report to her lab employee that the child had been at the birthday party.  This type of social ostracism can only cause further damage to the working environment in the labs.  
Officials from the labs and the Energy Department expressed their desire to win back the trust of Asian-American scientists.  The US certainly needs their skills and knowledge, but given the hostile treatment they have experienced in the past months, it will likely be some time before the situation returns to normal.