China is exposing the private medical information of minority families and exposing experiments being done on these families without their consent in a series of genetic studies published in Chinese scientific peer-reviewed journals. This is what was alleged in a paper discovered in 2017 bio bioinformationist Yves Moreau. What Moreau discovered was a paper called “Human Genetics.” In this paper, Moreau discovered what seemed to be basic ethical standards violations, which led him down a rabbit hole of other such Chinese genetics reports with even more ethical and scientific issues created for reasons that don’t appear to reflect objective scientific curiousity.
Genetic papers containing data from China’s ethnic minorities draw fire |
From www.sciencemag.org
2021-08-10 05:00:00
Excerpt:
When Yves Moreau, a bioinformatician at KU Leuven in Belgium, noticed a 2017 paper in Human Genetics that described the “male genetic landscape of China” based on a set of almost 38,000 Y-STR sequences, he saw a red flag. Y-STR stands for Y-chromosomal short tandem repeat polymorphism, bits of repetitive DNA often used in forensic investigations. Some of the samples came from Uyghurs and other minorities in China, and Moreau was skeptical that they had given informed consent for the use of their genetic data or understood that China might use it to profile their people. In June 2020, he asked the journal’s editors to retract the “indefensible” paper.
Springer Nature, its publisher, launched an investigation that is still ongoing. So last month, Moreau stepped up the pressure: He wrote to the journal’s entire editorial board to complain about the lack of progress. For Moreau, the paper is just one of many studies, primarily in forensic genetics, that deserve scrutiny because of consent problems in China and the potential for abuse of the data. He says he has flagged about 28 papers at six journals over the past couple of years.
And his campaign is gaining traction. Eight of 25 members of the editorial board of Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, published by Wiley, recently resigned to protest the lack of progress in investigating a number of papers flagged by Moreau, as The Intercept reported last week.
