The House Oversight Committee says it is aware of a machine operated by a Chinese military company that is in use at the nation’s most secretive government laboratories.
“We are aware that there is a BGI machine at Los Alamos,” a committee spokeswoman told Fox News Digital.
Situated in rural New Mexico, Los Alamos is one of the most top-secret labs in the country where the atomic bomb was produced through the Manhattan Project in 1943.
The spokeswoman noted the Biosecure Act, which passed the House Monday, would ban the machinery at Los Alamos by prohibiting U.S. taxpayer dollars from flowing to biotech companies that are owned, operated or controlled by China or other foreign adversaries.
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The bill was referred to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, and it’s not clear if and when the Senate plans to take it up.
The Oversight Committee did not say whether it would conduct an investigation into the BGI-linked machinery.
The CCP-linked Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) is a leading biotech and genomics company in China and has been defined by the Pentagon as a “Chinese military company” and “China’s Biotech National Champion.”
BGI Group, which runs a massive gene databank in China and has DNA sequencing contracts with health firms and universities worldwide, has received substantial investment from China’s biggest state investment vehicle, the State Development and Investment Corp.
The National Security Commission on AI stated that BGI “may be serving, wittingly or unwittingly, as a global collection mechanism for Chinese government gene databases, providing China with greater raw numbers and diversity of human genome samples as well as access to sensitive personal information about key individuals around the world.”
BGI has created a number of new subsidiaries in the U.S. over the past two years to further evade scrutiny.
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The Pentagon listed BGI as a “Chinese Military Company” operating in the U.S. and added two of its subsidiaries to a trade blacklist over allegations they conducted genetic analysis and surveillance activities for Beijing. The Department of Commerce said that information “has been utilized in the repression of ethnic minorities in China.”
In 2021, BGI created a neonatal genetic test with the CCP that allowed it to collect information from millions of women for research on traits of populations, according to a Reuters report.
In 2022, information security firm Strider Technologies found China had engaged in a decades-long campaign to insert and recruit allied researchers from Los Alamos.
The report asserted that, between 1987 and 2021, at least 162 scientists who passed through the nuclear research lab returned and worked with the Chinese government.
Of these, 15 were permanent staff members, many carrying high levels of security clearances.
In 2022, BGI acquired Complete Genomics, a U.S. genomic sequencing firm, and in 2022, BGI spun off MGI, which went public on the Shanghai stock market and housed Complete Genomics as a subsidiary of MGI. MGI is still majority owned by BGI and entities with ties to the CCP.
