According to a publication of the state media company Shanghai United Media Group, the president and cofounder of BGI forbids his employees from having children with birth defects, which he says would be a “disgrace” to the company. Not one of the 1,400 children born to employees has had serious congenital diseases, he says. “In the United States and in the West, you have a certain way,” he told the New Yorker. “You feel you are advanced and you are the best. Blah, blah, blah. You follow all these rules and have all these protocols and laws and regulations. You need somebody to change it. To blow it up.”
If history is any guide, China will do just that. The world has become desensitized to the incredible scale of China’s flagrant human rights violations. Though exact numbers are unknown, the country’s system of forcibly — and sometimes fatally — removing and selling the organs of religious minorities and prisoners of conscience is among the largest and most grotesque violations of medical norms in the modern world. So too is the state’s use of forced abortions, sterilizations, and birth control on Uyghurs in the service of its genocide against the Muslim minority. And though the one-child policy was lifted in 2015, it was the largest reproductive social experiment in the history of humanity, involving untold numbers of brutal, state-administered forced abortions and sterilizations, and leading to an imbalance of 30 million more men than women in the country due to selective abortion of girls. And while these atrocities relied on relatively rudimentary technologies, China’s biotechnology ascent suggests that its next round of ethics violations are likely to be at the cutting edge of eugenics and genetic enhancement.