Mark Munsterhjelm raises alarm about the complicity of researchers and suppliers in forensic genetics in the Chinese government’s repression of Indigenous peoples in Xinjiang.

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Since 2019, the field of forensic genetics has been in a state of upheaval over research and genetic surveillance done in Xinjiang and Tibet, regions that have been under severe Chinese government repression for several years. There have been extended criticism of prominent Western scientists’ research cooperation and an increasing number of retractions of articles by journals published by prominent companies like Springer over concerns about the validity of informed consent claims made by Chinese security agency-affiliated researchers for research subjects including Uyghur, Tibetan, and other Indigenous and minority peoples in China. Western scientific manufacturers like Thermo Fisher, Qiagen, and Illumina have been under criticism for cooperating in research and providing the various Chinese government security agencies with equipment, supplies and support for research and development with forensic genetic systems for use in large-scale genetic surveillance.

Based on nearly a decade of research, analysis, and some direct involvement in these international disputes, in my 2023 book Forensic Colonialism: Genetics and the Capture of Indigenous Peoples, I argue that these ethical and political crises are an outcome of forensic genetics’ hierarchies of power that have long denied Indigenous peoples’ rights and sovereignty. This denial has been perpetrated by forensic genetics scientists in the name of protecting their respective settler colonial states and the rest of humanity from terrorists and criminals, something that has intensified after the Bush Jr. Administration’s declaration of the “Global War on Terror”. It is typical of an overriding culture of complicity in which informed consent claims, no matter how old or far-fetched, are uncritically accepted within the networks of forensic genetics research, development, and usage.

Image Description: An image of the cover of the book Forensic Colonialism: Genetics and the Capture of Indigenous Peoples authored by Mark Munsterhjelm.

This situation points towards a fundamental ethical void at the center of forensic genetics done in the name of public security. The failure to recognize the rights of the Uyghurs continued forensic geneticists’ long-established patterns of ignoring Indigenous peoples’ rights and autonomy, and failing to consider vulnerable populations. Informed consent claims have been essentially meaningless with regard to Indigenous peoples in many prominent forensic genetic research networks. This is exemplified by the Karitiana and Surui peoples of Western Brazil who were controversially sampled in 1987, and who have repeatedly called for the end of research with their genetic materials and data.

The Indigenous peoples’ samples or derived cell lines in the controversial Human Genome Diversity Project and other similar collections were originally enrolled mostly for epidemiology, human evolution, and health research, with some taken in the 1970s and 1980s. However, their samples and data have been co-opted into radically different usages of developing forensic genetic technologies, not to help people, but to hunt people in the service of post-9/11 security states. However, forensic genetics has routinely violated contemporary international norms requiring consent and community consultations over usage and commercialization involving Indigenous peoples’ genetic materials, something recognized in the United Nation’s Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Article 31. This lackadaisical acceptance of informed consent claims in forensic genetics has allowed the use of Karitiana and the Surui and other Indigenous peoples as “resources” in a state of genetic servitude in the Human Genome Diversity Project. Noted geneticist Kenneth Kidd of Yale University, who conceived the Project along with the geneticist Lucas L. Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University, used his extensive collection of Indigenous peoples’ genetic materials (mainly cell lines) and data and post-9/11 US Department of Justice funding to develop individual identification and ancestry inference marker panels that are now included in Thermo Fisher and Illumina forensic genetic systems being marketed to police agencies including those of China. Kidd even did joint research and shared 2266 DNA extract samples, including those of the Karitiana and Surui, with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science in Beijing, who in turn used these in research and Chinese patents on ancestry inference targeting Uyghurs.

Given such long-established lax standards of informed consent, it was not surprising that Western scientists and journals uncritically accepted Chinese security agency researchers’ informed consent claims involving Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other Indigenous peoples in China. If there were a meaningful internal ethical system in forensic genetics, then immediately in 2017-18 as overwhelming evidence of the Chinese government incarcerating hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Xinjiang peoples, forensic genetic journals would have begun reviews of existing articles authored by Chinese scientists involving Uyghurs, particularly those from security agencies like the Institute of Forensic Science of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security. If there were a meaningful internal ethical system, forensic genetic equipment suppliers like Thermo Fisher, Illumina, and Qiagen would have discontinued sales. Indeed, if ethical oversight was truly effective, the beginning of arrests of Uyghur and other Indigenous activists and intellectuals in 2013-14 and the suppression of their independent websites and news sources, the beginning of the re-education camps in 2015 and growing repression would have triggered some type of an alert or review within the discipline of forensic genetics with regards to the plausibility of informed consent and population vulnerability.

However, the opposite has occurred. Instead, Western researchers and journals and equipment companies simply accepted without question the informed consent and ethics claims made by scientists and institutional review boards of the Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science, the paramilitary Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps that dominates much of Xinjiang, and other Chinese police agencies. These failures are due to a systemic lack of due diligence. It is imperative that forensic genetics as a discipline, ethics review boards, funders, and the corporate sector develop meaningful consultation processes in any research involving Indigenous peoples and other vulnerable populations.

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Mark Munsterhjelm teaches in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Windsor.