The global crisis created by the coronavirus pandemic and the rush to create and distribute a vaccine widely hoped to be a “silver bullet” that can facilitate a return to “normalcy” threatens to upend seven decades of assumptions about bioethical norms.

The arrest of Harvard chemist and nanobiologist Charles Lieber on charges of lying about his research funding from China encapsulates two phenomena currently in tension: the global nature of modern science and attempts to nationalize the fruits of science.