What does the Chinese military want with your unborn baby’s genetic data?
By Arwa Mahdawi,
The Guardian
| 07. 10. 2021
The BGI group has used data from its popular prenatal test to help the People’s Liberation Army improve ‘population quality’ but they are far from the only ones normalizing eugenics
Your unborn baby is already being monetized
Could data harvested from millions of pregnant women pave the way for genetically enhanced super-soldiers? According to a recent Reuters investigation, BGI Group, the manufacturers of a popular prenatal test, is working with the Chinese military towards that very goal.
BGI group offers a test called Nifty (“Non-Invasive Fetal TrisomY”), which is offered in more than 50 countries and is used to look for genetic abnormalities such as Down’s syndrome early on in a pregnancy. According to Reuters, more than 8 million women have taken these tests, and BGI has used the genetic data it has collected to help the Chinese military improve “population quality”. Reuters reports that US government advisers have warned that access to this massive databank could “propel China to dominate global pharmaceuticals, and also potentially lead to genetically enhanced soldiers, or engineered pathogens to target the US population or food supply”. BGI has issued a statement rejecting these claims.
“China is stealing your intimate data for evil purposes” is a popular genre in western journalism – see, for...
Related Articles
By Jonathan D. Grinstein, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | 06.26.2024
Partial screenshot from The Bridge Recombination Mechanism
video by The Arc Institute on YouTube (CC)
Buried in a family of mobile genetic elements, Arc Institute researchers led by Patrick Hsu, PhD, have discovered an RNA-guided system that enables modular...
By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 05.31.2024
Last year, Jaume Pellicer led a team of fellow scientists into a forest on Grande Terre, an island east of Australia. They were in search of a fern called Tmesipteris oblanceolata. Standing just a few inches tall, it was not...
By Liz Szabo, The New York Times | 05.29.2024
By the time Rena Barrow-Wells gave birth to her fourth baby in 2020, she was well-versed in caring for a child with cystic fibrosis. She was also experienced in fighting for a diagnosis of the disease, which runs in families...
By Alison Snyder, Axios | 06.06.2024
Gene editing's next chapter will be focused on tackling cancers and more common diseases, uncovering new details about aging and other fundamental aspects of biology and editing RNA, top scientists in the field said this week.
The big picture: ...