Examples cited by Chinese authorities include He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who was widely condemned after creating the world’s first gene-edited babies.
And China has been pouring billions of dollars into its efforts to become the preeminent force, with experts claiming its massive population of 1.4 billion people can provide a treasure trove of data.
However, some experts have warned that this genetic hoarding could make global research cooperation more difficult – and potentially backfire on China. And the country’s genetics could offer a “strategic resource and a treasure trove,” thanks to the sheer number of people and its “healthy and long-lived populations,” officials have claimed – though scientists caveat that each country’s genetic population is valuable in its own way.
Understanding what genes do is “one of the most important questions in the next generation of both medicine and also biological research,” Puglisi added. “Access to that kind of data, both their own and from other places in the world, gives them an advantage in figuring out some of those problems.” “Running a biobank costs a lot of money, and not being able to use the data or material that’s been collected is a waste of resource,” she said.
Katherine Wang, a partner at global law firm Ropes & Gray who focus on life sciences, said the science ministry hadn’t yet specified the “contents or areas of focus of this exercise.” The regulations assert that the collection of genetic resources in China will respect the “privacy rights” of their donors, come with “written informed consent,” and comply with an ethical review.For instance, a massive online database with the personal information of up to one billion Chinese citizens was left unsecured and publicly accessible for more than a year – until an anonymous user offered to sell the data in 2022.
CNN has reached out to the Ministry of Science and Technology for comment on its privacy protection measures.With DNA increasingly seen as a valuable natural resource like oil or land, China is keen to protect its people’s genes – to the alarm of some scientists who fear the loss of international collaboration.
The approach on human genetic resources is so stringent it “basically grants exclusive access to Chinese nationals based in China to conduct this research,” said Zhang, the global science center director.
For instance, the UK Biobank, a database supported by the government’s National Health Service, provides anonymized genetic data from UK residents to “researchers around the world who use it to make new scientific discoveries,” according to the biobank’s site.
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