Will the Trump administration’s research funding cuts open the door for foreign governments to buy their way into American laboratories? 

That question surfaced this week after a researcher at Harvard University’s School of Public Health secured a $39 million lifeline for his biology laboratory from an investment group in Turkey that appears to have ties to the government. Harvard, whose School of Public Health lost $200 million in federal funding this year, called the agreement a “model for future private-sector collaborations.”

According to the deal, announced Monday, İş Private Equity, a subsidiary of Istanbul-based İşbank Group, will financially back a biology laboratory at Harvard run by a Turkish-American scientist, Gökhan Hotamışlıgil. The $39 million gift will fund the next 10 years of Mr. Hotamışlıgil’s research on antibodies for obesity and other metabolic diseases at Harvard’s School of Public Health.

The Turkish firm has also pledged to invest an undisclosed amount of money in any drug candidates that may emerge from the lab. 

Mr. Hotamışlıgil, who lost out on crucial funding when the government froze more than $2.2 billion in federal grants and contracts to Harvard, celebrated the deal.

“It was really a series of unanticipated good coincidences and my willingness to talk sincerely about the challenges that I face in my own scientific adventures,” he told a biotechnology news outlet, Fierce Biotech. 

The chief executive officer of İş Private Equity, Kubilay Aykol, similarly lauded the deal, predicting during the signing ceremony at Harvard that “this effort will generate value not just for Turkey, but for the global scientific community.” 

As other research labs at Harvard and beyond struggle to stay afloat, Mr. Hotamışlıgil’s success story might prompt them to similarly seek out funding abroad. Harvard’s School of Public Health, for one, is already convening an advisory group to help researchers connect with potential private sector partners. 

However, the agreement was flagged by a higher education nonprofit, American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which noted that İşbank, though a private entity, “has ties to the Turkish government.” The council, which partners with universities to promote academic freedom and free speech, also added that countries like China and Qatar “have demonstrated how dictatorships can use ‘private’ investment to exercise state power.” 

Turkey’s president, Tayyip Erdogan, announced in 2019 that the country’s Treasury would take over a 28 percent stake in İşbank previously held by the opposition party, the Republican People’s Party. The party inherited the stake in İşbank from the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. 

In 2022, a political advocacy group called the Turkish Democracy Project urged Citibank to review its partnership with İşbank, claiming that it “has recently come under state control” and now serves as a “critical tool in President Erdogan’s campaign to place the Turkish financial sector under his regime’s kleptocratic control.” 

Donations to American universities have come under new scrutiny amid reports that overseas giving has exploded in recent years, with foreign donors forking over as much to American universities in the last four years as they did in the previous 40 years.

Qatar, the largest source of overseas donations to American universities, has shelled out $6.3 billion since reporting began in 1986. The second-largest source, China, has given an estimated $5.6 billion, and stands as the single largest source of foreign donations to prestigious American universities like Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford. 

In many cases, those donations are given to fund joint education institutes or overseas campuses, like Northwestern’s branch in Doha, or U.C. Berkeley’s partnership with Tsinghua University in Beijing. 

Such partnerships were put under the microscope by Congress, which, after a year-long investigation, came to the conclusion that American-Chinese joint education institutions actually serve as “conduits” for “transferring critical U.S. technologies and expertise to China” — the kind of knowledge that the “Chinese military could use against the U.S. military in the event of a conflict.” 

The problem has been exacerbated by universities’ failure to comply with the provisions of Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires schools to report foreign gifts or contracts that are more than $250,000. As a result, the true value of foreign donations could be much greater than reported. 

The issue has been taken up by President Trump, who signed an executive order in April threatening to revoke federal funding from universities that don’t comply with gift reporting mandates. 

And where there is supply, there is also demand — demand that may grow as research universities navigate the federal government’s crackdown on National Institutes of Health research grants and university-specific funding freezes. Harvard, though currently challenging the government’s revocation of more than $2.2 billion in federal grants and contacts, won’t gain access to the frozen funds until at least well into the summer, when it’s set to meet the government in court. 

The funding cuts at Harvard’s School of Public Health, which relies heavily on federal support, have reportedly thrown it into an “existential crisis.” 

Harvard has not yet responded to the Sun’s request for comment.