Yves Moreau

The papers were first flagged by Yves Moreau, an engineering professor at KU Leuven in Belgium, who spent years investigating how Chinese researchers collect genetic data from vulnerable populations.

Forensic Science Research is an English quarterly journal supervised by the Ministry of Justice of China and sponsored by the China Institute of Forensic Science. In 2023, Yves Moreau, an engineering scholar at the University of Leuven in Belgium, first raised doubts about the relationship between Oxford University Press and Forensic Science Research.

For Yves Moreau, a computational biologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium who studies the ethics of human data, the rise of surveillance is an example of ‘technological somnambulism’, in which humans sleepwalk into use of a technology without much reflection. Publishers should enforce their own ethical standards. Computer-vision researchers should refer to humans as humans, making clear to all the possible scope of their research’s use. Scientists should consider their own personal ethics and use them to guide what they work on. Science organizations should speak out on what is or is not acceptable. “In my own work around misuse of forensic genetics, I have found that entering the social debate and saying ‘this is not what we meant this technology for’, this has an impact,” says Moreau. Reflection must happen now.

In a wider analysis, the researchers searched all the patents for a list of keywords linked to surveillance, such as ‘iris’, ‘criminal’ and ‘facial recognition’. They found that in the 2010s, 78% of computer-vision papers that led to patents produced ones related to surveillance, compared with 53% in the 1990s (see ‘Surveillance-enabling research’). Almost “the entire field is working on faces and gaits, on detecting people in images, and nobody seems to be saying, ‘Wait, what are we doing here?’” says Moreau.

Yves Moreau, a geneticist who has worked on projects using data from UK Biobank and praises it as a “world class” resource, said China’s rulers “regard genomic data and other health data as strategic”. He said it was “reasonable to worry about China vacuuming such data from around the world to strengthen its biotech sector”.

On March 14, 2021, Yves Moreau, a computational biologist specializing in human genetics and a Professor of Engineering at the University of Leuven, contacted the Editor-in-Chief of MGGM and copied me into this email. He notified us that the journal had become the premier venue for the publication of forensic genetics research on vulnerable Tibetan and Muslim minorities from China.

Intussen is er zoveel vooruitgang in genetisch onderzoek dat sommigen daar gebruik van maken om opnieuw twijfel te zaaien over de verschillen tussen groepen, vertelt Moreau. [...] “Als zoiets wordt gepusht door superkrachtige influencers, dan moeten we daar als wetenschappers een antwoord op formuleren”, vindt Moreau, die er vrijdag zijn collega’s over aansprak op een bijeenkomst van de Belgian Society for Human Genetics. “Dat een filosoof zich over die vraagstukken buigt, is prima, maar zijn artikels worden versterkt tot ver buiten de academische wereld en gebruikt ter verantwoording van bepaalde denkbeelden.”

I am immensely honored to have been awarded a doctorate honoris causa from UCLouvain, Belgium on February 27, 2025. Over the years, my efforts to push back against the misuse of forensic DNA technology have taken place through a network of collaborators. I would like them to feel that this recognition is shared with them! I have also been blessed to work with many fantastic journalists. I would like to dedicate this award to the hundreds of academics of Xinjiang who are arbitrarily detained, have disappeared, or have been unfairly sentenced, including Prof. Ilham Tohti, an economist at Central Minzu University, Sakharov Prize laureate, sentenced to life, and Prof. Rahile Dawut, an ethnographer at Xinjiang University, sentenced to life. Thank you to Sophie Richardson, Maya Wang, Emile Dirks, Ausma Bernot, PhD, Sui-Lee Wee, Mara Hvistendahl, and many more!

“This study is particularly concerning because it is a technical milestone towards enabling a database at the scale of the entire population of China in a situation where basic fundamental rights of the Chinese population are not protected properly,” Moreau says. “Thermo Fisher has knowingly enabled the deployment of this technology on a massive scale by an authoritarian regime in the absence of elementary fundamental rights safeguards.” The John Wiley & Sons journal Electrophoresis published the original study in 2016. In...

Geneticists map the knowledge they have gained, for example in relation to the prevalence of hereditary diseases. I feel that there is no awareness that this is dangerous because maps are political objects. When you start drawing precise maps, someone always starts drawing boundaries. If we want this research, we have to accept that we have a responsibility to society. If we see that the data is being instrumentalized in a very stigmatizing and discriminatory way, then we as scientists have a duty to intervene.

"Research ethics is not just about complying with the formalities of the law - it goes far beyond that. And when there are obviously so many ethical problems with these studies, it is an astonishing announcement. It feels as if the university has thought that now that the researcher with the most problematic connections to China's authorities is no longer associated with the university, the matter is over," he says, referring to the Chinese researcher who left his position as postdoc at Copenhagen's University in 2020.

Statement by the European Society of Human Genetics and the British Society for Genetic Medicine. Cosigned as a member of the Policy and Ethics Committee of the European Society of Human Genetics.

Maar een beweging naar morele onverschilligheid kan zich vlug voordoen. Als onderzoek met dubbel gebruik of militair onderzoek aanvaardbaar wordt in een immens onderzoeksprogramma zoals Horizon Europa, schept dat de indruk dat dit sociaal en moreel aanvaardbaar is. De morele verantwoordelijkheid voor de gevaren van een technologie wordt dan doorgeschoven naar diegenen die aan toepassingen werken. De onderzoekers worden zo van hun verantwoordelijkheid ontheven.

On voit qu’on est face ici à une question essentielle pour l’Union européenne : un programme de recherche majeur exclusivement focalisé sur la recherche civile doit-il dans le futur servir en partie à soutenir le secteur de l’armement ? Une telle question nécessite un large débat public et démocratique. La Commission semble avoir déjà décidé à la place des citoyens européens et préférer ne pas s’encombrer d’un tel débat.

When it comes to BGI’s prenatal tests, Moreau says that some technical considerations are important, namely that: “when carried out as designed, they do not provide detailed or even clear information about the entire genome of the mother or the foetus.” However, given that BGI sends samples for testing in Hong Kong, the question for Moreau is whether a patient wants their DNA sample “to potentially end up somewhere in China, where it's really hard to control what happens with it?”

Many of the big publishers take this too lightly. They make great speeches about ethical principles, but when violations of these rules are discovered, they want to sweep it under the rug. It is ethical laundering of the research, says Yves Moreau, professor of bioinformatics at the prestigious university KU Leuven in Belgium. For several years, Moreau has warned about unethical genetics research that deals with vulnerable groups in China. So far, 33 studies have been retracted as a result of his revelations, but it has been a struggle.