The American biomedical company Thermo Fisher describes a prominent product featured on its website, the RapidHIT ID system, as an instrument capable of generating “forensic DNA profiles in as little as 90 minutes” with “no technical expertise required.” The description ends with an enticing promise: “Safer communities are within reach.” In reality, this product has been used by the Chinese government as part of its surveillance apparatus.
This year, amidst mounting international scientific pressure, Thermo Fisher announced that it would halt sales to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Previously, Thermo Fisher had pledged to shut down sales in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, China, where the CCP’s persecution of Uyghurs—which includes crimes against humanity and potentially genocide—has partly relied on mass DNA identification technologies. However, rights abuses against Uyghurs have been widely reported on since the mid-2010s, and Thermo Fisher continued doing business in the region in the interim years. Aside from the obvious economic incentives, the ambiguous legal framework and jurisdiction surrounding biotechnology, and thus lack of legal consequences, enabled this delayed response. Thermo Fisher’s decision highlights how authoritarian states exploit scientific collaboration for their own repressive purposes, as well as the complicity of many Western companies and universities at essentially every step of the surveillance process.
The Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim minority group, face involuntary internment, forced sterilization, “re-education,” and family separation at the arbitrary will of the Chinese government. Under the guise of “Physicals for All,” a mandatory medical check-up program, the government forcibly collects genetic samples and phenotypic information from Uyghurs—including blood draws, iris imaging, and other personal data—in blatant violation of human genome rights and scientific consent. In Tibet, a region in western China, genetic samples are also being taken en masse, including from boys as young as five years old. While these samples are taken from most parts of Chinese society, minority groups are disproportionately targeted—often with coercive measures like threatening calls and texts from local police and cadres, according to a 2019 New York Times investigation. With this data readily available, government officials and police precincts throughout the country with DNA identification technology can predict a person’s facial features and overall appearance from a single DNA sample. As Mark Munsterhjelm, a bioethics researcher at the University of Windsor, told the New York Times, the CCP is essentially using these technologies “for hunting people.”
The funding for this genetic sampling research comes from sources like China’s Ministry of Public Security and European scientific institutions. At least two scientists working with the Ministry of Public Security on genetic testing have received financial support from research groups like the Max Planck Society in Germany, which provided these geneticists an annual grant of $22,000. A spokeswoman for the Max Planck Society claims that this grant was awarded and spent by these geneticists before they began collaborating with the Chinese government, but even if this claim is true, it calls into question the ethics of collaborating with any scientific entity within an authoritarian system. Similarly, Liu Fan, a researcher at Beijing’s Institute of Genomics and co-author of a recent study into Uyghur genetics, is an adjunct assistant professor at the Dutch-based Erasmus University Medical Center. Both Erasmus and the Planck Society are respected research institutions that not only directly funded this work but also conferred legitimacy to it.
US-based financial institutions—including Qualcomm Ventures, Fidelity International, Sequoia Capital, and Sinovation Ventures—have also invested in SenseTime, which the US government recently sanctioned for using genetic samples to determine whether citizens are ethnically Han or Uyghur. San Diego-based Qualcomm Ventures and Boston-headquartered Fidelity International were part of a coalition that invested $620 million into the company. American Sequoia Capital and Sinovation Ventures also funded similar facial recognition companies that rely on Uyghur data, although the latter recently broke ties with the CCP amidst growing global condemnation of its treatment of Uyghurs.
Western companies and researchers have also funded and legitimized the gene sequencing of the genetic samples collected from Uyghurs and other Chinese ethnic minorities. US companies, including Thermo Fisher and San Diego-based Illumina, have provided the equipment required to analyze and process DNA sample fragments in the Xinjiang and Tibetan minority regions. Until 2019, Thermo Fisher sold equipment directly to Xinjiang authorities, and in 2022, the Tibetan police purchased $160,000 worth of profiling kits from the company. Additionally, Illumina’s technology produces higher-end DNA sequencers which have also been used to analyze Uyghur and Tibetan DNA, largely for scientific purposes rather than as a direct surveillance measure. These sales continued despite the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Chinese genetics companies involved in DNA analysis, including Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), one of the world’s largest genetic analysis companies that also bought sequencing technologies from Illumina. Thermo Fisher has freely admitted its involvement in its 2017 report, stating that their “greatest success story in emerging markets continues to be in China,” which the company said provided 10 percent of its revenue that year.
While the profit motives for corporations such as Thermo Fisher are clear, more altruistically regarded scientific establishments are similarly entangled. Several leading scientific journals in the past half-decade have undergone internal evaluations because of the publication of papers that relied on DNA collected from Uyghur populations. One such publication, Springer Nature, published an anthology that included two papers that incorporated thousands of Uyghur DNA samples into their methodologies. The research was later presented at a conference in the Xinjiang region in 2018, after reports of Uyghur persecution had already gained international attention. While this does not directly enable the Chinese government’s surveillance of its citizens, it certainly legitimizes the brutality of the CCP’s genetic data collection regime. These journals are not just neutral platforms: they have significant influence within the global scientific community, an oft-used term denoting the reticulate nature of research in our globalized context. These symbiotic relationships result in unethically collected samples being published in international publications, which legitimizes the research and increases researchers and their project’s ability to get funding. Thus, within every step of the scientific research process, from sample collection to paper publication, Western companies and institutions have been actively complicit.
This web of scientific collaboration raises the question of whether increased international oversight would effectively address these issues. The international legal architecture for bioethics is largely based on a set of declarations by the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) including the 1998 Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, the 2003 International Declaration on Human Genetic Data, and the 2005 Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. These declarations were among the first major attempts to codify personal freedoms in response to the swiftly advancing field of genetic sequencing. All of these documents, adopted unanimously in general conference, were constructed several decades after the inception of sequencing technologies and required years of debate, although the National Institute of Health has specifically emphasized that the latter required “only two years of negotiations.” The lag between technological advances and regulations highlights the limitations of international regulation as a solution to these issues.
Currently, we are approaching the 20th anniversary of perhaps the most comprehensive piece of global bioethics legislation: The UNESCO Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights. It encompasses 15 principles and rights, including the Principle of Vulnerability which recognizes that some groups are particularly vulnerable to violations of personal genetic autonomy due to factors such as coercion. Minority groups under Chinese governmental control—such as the Uyghurs and Tibetans—clearly fall within this category. As such, this declaration acknowledges these bioethical violations and potentially provides a path forward. Looking at Article Two, the direction of this path is stated in the aims, the first of which is “to provide a universal framework of principles and procedures to guide States in the formulation of their legislation, policies or other instruments in the field of bioethics.” However, the verb “guide” reveals an inherent pitfall in this legislation: the difficulty of actually enforcing international law. Since this legislation was enacted, there have been few successful attempts at further multilateral cooperation to combat genetic rights violations.While some nations are introducing their own laws, such as the Biotech 2024 Act, recently introduced into the US Senate to specifically target BGI, the case of Thermo Fisher demonstrates the need for effective international cooperation.
The current legal framework for rapidly advancing biotechnology remains inadequate to combat China’s ongoing human rights violations against ethnic minorities, which are enabled by external scientific research and financial institutions. The forcible collection of DNA from Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China poses a challenge to the globalized scientific community’s norm of collaboration, which has historically allowed for major advances and breakthroughs. As seen in Xinjiang and Tibet, when scientific advancement is manipulated to be a means of surveillance, it not only puts China in violation of international law but also implicates many Western companies at nearly every step of the process.