UK Assessing Risk of Collaborating With China on Research, Minister Says
The UK government is assessing the national security risk of all Sino–British research and innovation links, a minister said on Wednesday.
Responding to concerns raised by Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael about national security risks in genomics, particularly in collaborating with Chinese genomics company BGI, science minister George Freeman said MPs are “well aware that we have to manage such risks properly.”
Freeman said he had commissioned and just received a detailed assessment of “all the China research and innovation links across our system” from the UK Research and Innovation, the new government hub for innovation, adding, “We did the same last year for Russia.”
Freeman said he will pore over the assessment with officials and security minister Tom Tugendhat, “looking in particular at some of the actors such as BGI that we know to be aggressive in their international acquisition of intellectual property.”
It comes after the U.S. Commerce Department last week blacklisted a number of Chinese entities, including three BGI Group subsidiaries—genetics company BGI Research, biotechnology company BGI Tech Solutions Co., and Forensics Genomics International—over their alleged involvement in military programs and the repression of ethnic minorities in China.
Freeman also claimed that during the visit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping in 2015, when he was the parliamentary under secretary for life sciences, he had been “prepared to pay tribute to the work of BGI,” but officials pointed out that “at that point Genomics England was suffering several hack attacks from BGI each week.”
But according to The Guardian, government sources sought to walk back the claims a few hours after Freeman’s appearance in the House of Commons, saying that while Genomics England do receive regular failed hacking attempts, there is “no evidence of attempted hacking of Genomics England in 2014 from BGI.”
The Epoch Times has contacted the government for verification of the statement.
BGI Genomics is one of the companies that won Public Health England’s COVID-19 contracts in 2021, official records show. According to the Daily Mail, it was a COVID-19 testing contract worth £11 million.
BGI Genomics was founded in 1999 to represent China in the “Human Genome Project,” which it hailed as one of the greatest scientific project in the 20th century along with the Manhattan Project and Apollo Program.
In 2008, the world-leading genomics company also took part in the “1,000 Genomes Project,” another global collaboration project that created a catalogue of common human genetic variation.
According to the BGI website, it has continued exchanges with international partners in recent years, visiting 24 countries and areas, including the UK, last year and had exchanges with 35 top universities and research institutes to push forward the global initiative on SpatioTemporal Omics that it launched last May to accelerate research in areas such as specific evolution, fetal development, and pathology.
But the company is also alleged to be involved in Chinese military projects and human rights violations—allegations it has denied.
Reuters previously reported that BGI was collecting genetic data from millions of women for sweeping research on the traits of populations, and that it collaborates with the Chinese military.
On March 2, the U.S. Commerce Department added (pdf) three BGI Group subsidiaries to its export restrictions entities list, saying the decision was based “upon information that indicates their collection and analysis of genetic data poses a significant risk of contributing to monitoring and surveillance by the government of China, which has been utilized in the repression of ethnic minorities in China.”
The document added that information also indicates “the actions of these entities concerning the collection and analysis of genetic data present a significant risk of diversion to China’s military programs.”
BGI didn’t immediately respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment. In a previous statement in response to the U.S. export ban, BGI said it disagrees with the decision.
“We believe the BIS’s [Bureau of Industry and Security’s] decision may have been impacted by misinformation and we are willing and able to clarify. BGI Group’s work strictly abides by local, regional, and global moral and ethical standards, and adheres to all required laws and regulations,” the company said in a statement.
“BGI Group does not condone and would never be involved in any human-rights abuses. None of BGI Group is state-owned or state-controlled, and all of BGI Group’s services and research are provided for civilian and scientific purposes,” it added.
Reuters contributed to this report.
