Journal retracts Thermo Fisher Scientific study after ethical concerns

An academic journal has retracted a study conducted by researchers with the science services giant Thermo Fisher Scientific over concerns that a tool used in the study violates the ethical standards of forensic genetics.

The John Wiley & Sons journal Electrophoresis published the original study in 2016. In July 2024, Yves Moreau, who studies the use of artificial intelligence and software in drug discovery and clinical genomics at KU Leuven, filed a complaint about the study with the editors of Electrophoresis.

“They took up the concerns that I expressed. They passed those concerns to the publisher, and Wiley started an investigation with their team,” Moreau says.

As part of the probe, Wiley contacted the study’s authors for more information about the informed consent procedure. Some of the authors responded that they couldn’t provide such details, according to the retraction notice issued by the journal in October.

Among Moreau’s concerns with the study is that it used a forensic DNA database that may be used by Chinese police to identify individuals who are not part of the database. Such databases have “been deployed on a large scale, often without much regard to safeguards for rights of people who might be caught in DNA investigations,” he says.

The study used Chinese data on short tandem repeats on Y chromosomes, which are passed down the paternal lineage. “A DNA investigation of the Y chromosome will reveal not who the person is but a cluster of people who share the same Y chromosome, essentially a family,” Moreau says.

To create the database, Chinese authorities sent people across the country to collect DNA samples from one or two men per family, Moreau says, with the aim of collecting samples from 5–10% of the male population of China.

“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 2016 study was a collaboration between scientists at Thermo Fisher Scientific, which supplied polymerase chain reaction amplification kits, and public security officials working for the Chinese province of Henan. It reused data from a pilot program that collected 200,000 male DNA profiles in the province.

The data have now been withdrawn from the public record by Electrophoresis because of concerns that they can be used to identify individuals who participated in the study, according to the retraction notice.

“The retraction has been agreed to because the journal is not able to verify whether appropriate informed consent was obtained from all study participants whose Y-STR profiles were used for the research study reported in this article, which violates the journal’s and the publisher’s policies regarding informed consent for studies involving human subjects,” the notice states.

The study authors didn’t respond to the retraction notice. The study’s corresponding author, Jianye Ge, didn’t respond to C&EN’s request for a comment. Thermo Fisher Scientific also didn’t reply to requests for comment.