Yves Moreau

The most significant developments are still to come, warns bioinformatician Yves Moreau from the University of Leuven. Many scenarios that sound like science fiction today could become reality. Technological progress is so rapid that today's thought experiments could be technological reality in two or three decades. "We must begin these debates now," demands Moreau. Otherwise, society might wake up in 20 years to a world that surpasses its worst nightmares.

Wat gebeurt er met het individu als alles kenbaar en maakbaar wordt? Privacy versus gezondheid, algemeen belang versus individuele behoeften. Nieuw onderzoek suggereert dat ons DNA meer over ons bepaalt dan we denken, zelfs onze persoonlijkheid. Dit biedt kansen maar ook gevaren, waaronder de dreiging van Big Brother.

Het bedrijf SpinEdge is een start-up die rechtstreeks voortkomt uit een innovatieprogramma van het Israëlische ministerie van Defensie. De Vrije Universiteit Brussel stapte eerder dit jaar uit een (ander) Horizon Europe-project vanwege de deelname van zowel SpinEdge als de Bar Ilan Universiteit. “De beschrijving van dit project is vrij algemeen, maar het heeft zeker militair potentieel”, zegt Yves Moreau, AI-onderzoeker aan de Universiteit van Leuven. “Deze technologie kan nuttig zijn voor zelfrijdende auto’s, maar ook voor militaire drones.” Het Mosaic-onderzoek ging op 1 juli 2025 van start, en loopt nog tot eind juni 2028.

Toch is dat waar bio-informaticus Yves Moreau (KU Leuven) nog veel vragen bij heeft. "Wat ben je als mens met die informatie? Wat ga je doen als je hoort dat je meer risico loopt op een bepaalde aandoening? Vanaf welk risico ga je stappen ondernemen? Als je al iets kan doen om het risico te verlagen."

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.

Moreau said: “Forensic genetics is an area where specific caution is needed because this is the research that powers police DNA identification and databases. While DNA identification is a valuable technique to help solve crimes, it can raise privacy and ethical issues.” He added that the mass surveillance of minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet made China a particularly challenging country to enforce international norms about ethical research and human rights.

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.