A Chinese-born medical scientist at Harvard University risks losing a $750,000 federal grant for breast-cancer research because the government has delayed acting on her application for permanent residency, The Boston Globe reported today.

The National Institutes of Health requires its grant recipients to be permanent residents. The agency has said it will rescind the grant if the scientist, Loling Song, a biophysicist, does not gain residency status by November 30, the Globe said. The NIH has previously extended its deadline.

Ms. Song has been seeking a green card since April 2004, and last week she sued the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI to force them to decide her case, the Globe said. The applications of Ms. Song, her husband, and her son, all of whom are citizens of the Netherlands, have been held up because of an FBI background check. However, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has determined that Ms. Song is an immigrant “of extraordinary ability” and that because of her work she merits a “national-interest waiver,” which qualifies her application for speedier processing.

A spokesman for the immigration service, Shawn A. Saucier, told the Globe that his agency, a division of Homeland Security, processed about 1.3 million applications for residency and citizenship last year, and that about 99 percent of applications are cleared within six months.

The newspaper quoted Albert H. Teich, director of science and policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as saying that scientists born in China face among the highest immigration hurdles. Mr. Teich said that the government is concerned that profitable technologies developed by scientists working here will make their way to China, where intellectual-property standards are not rigorous.