The House Oversight Committee said it was aware of machines run by a Chinese military company being used in some of the most secretive government laboratories in the United States.
“We are aware that there is a BGI machine at Los Alamos,” a committee spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
Located in rural New Mexico, Los Alamos is one of the nation's most secretive laboratories, where the atomic bomb was built in 1943 through the Manhattan Project.
The spokesman noted that the BioSecure Act, which passed the House on Monday, would ban the Los Alamos machines by prohibiting U.S. taxpayer money from flowing to biotech companies owned, operated or controlled by China or other foreign adversaries.
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Blood samples and test results in clinical medical laboratory. (iStock)
The bill has been referred to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, but it is unclear if or when the Senate plans to take up the bill.
The watchdog did not say whether it would investigate machines linked to BGI.
The Communist Party-linked Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) is China's leading biotechnology and genomics company, defined by the Department of Defense as a “Chinese military enterprise” and “China's national biotechnology champion.”
BGI Group, which runs a massive genetic databank in China and has DNA-sequencing contracts with medical companies and universities around the world, has received significant investment from China's largest state-owned investment agency, the State Development Investment Corporation.
China has long been accused of stealing U.S. secrets from Los Alamos. The FBI believes China has used information stolen from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to miniaturize a nuclear bomb, The New York Times reported on March 6, 1999. (Atomic Energy Commission)
The National Artificial Intelligence Safety Commission said BGI “may, intentionally or not, serve as a global collection mechanism for the Chinese government's genetic database, providing China with access to large amounts of raw human genomic and diversity samples, as well as highly sensitive personal information on key individuals around the world.”
BGI has set up numerous new subsidiaries in the United States over the past two years in an effort to avoid further scrutiny.
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The Pentagon Listed on BGI The US Commerce Department has designated the company a “Chinese military enterprise” operating in the US and added two of its subsidiaries to a trade blacklist for allegedly conducting genetic analysis and surveillance activities for the Chinese government, saying the information was “used to oppress ethnic minorities in China.”
The first nuclear test, code-named “Trinity,” was conducted in 1945 at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Alamogordo, New Mexico. (Getty Images)
In 2021, BGI will collaborate with CCP to conduct newborn genetic testing, enabling it to collect information from millions of women for population characteristics studies, a research institute said. Reuters reported.
In 2022, information security firm Strider Technologies discovered that China had waged a decades-long campaign to send and recruit allied researchers from Los Alamos.
The report found that between 1987 and 2021, at least 162 scientists Atomic Energy Research Institute He returned to China and cooperated with the Chinese government.
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Of these, 15 are full-time employees, many of whom are high-level employees. Security Clearance.
In 2022, BGI acquired US genome sequencing company Complete Genomics, and in 2022 spun off MGI, which listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and brought Complete Genomics into the MGI subsidiary. MGI is still Majority owned By BGI and groups with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
