![]() ![]() Responding to the minister’s comments, Alistair Carmichael, the former Liberal Democrat cabinet minister who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on Uyghurs, the persecuted Muslim minority group in China, told the Guardian that he could not understand why a sensitive health contract could have been given to BGI. “However, like most organisations they do receive regular attempts to access their systems, for which there are appropriate defences in place. “There is no evidence of attempted hacking of Genomics England in 2014 from BGI”, the source said. Several hours after the minister’s comments, government sources sought to backtrack on the claims, without further explanation. “We did the same last year on Russia and I’ve passed that through to the security minister, and he and I and our officials are shortly to go through it in detail, in particular looking at some of those actors like BGI, who we know are quite aggressive in terms of international acquisition of intellectual property.” We are very well aware that we have to manage these risks properly.”įreeman added: “On that point I have literally just commissioned and received from UK Research and Innovation a detailed assessment of all of the China research and innovation links across our system. “I was preparing to pay tribute to the work of BGI when my officials pointed out that each week at that point Genomics England was receiving several hack attacks from BGI, and that was a wake-up call for all of us. When I was wheeled out in 2014 to give a speech on the occasion of the visit of President Xi to the Guildhall as President Xi and then PM Cameron were wheeled in, I was speaking to about a thousand Chinese delegates about Genomics England. He told MPs: “BGI is clearly one of those danger points in the ecosystem. ![]() The revelation came during a Commons debate in Westminster Hall, where Freeman, who was previously a minister for life sciences, was seeking to reassure concerned MPs that the government was aware of the risks posed by BGI. The Chinese company has also worked alongside and shared data with UK universities and the Wellcome Trust charitable foundation. Despite the “aggressive” approach of the Chinese company towards the intellectual property of others, its subsidiary, BGI Genomics, was handed an £11m Covid testing contract in 2021. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |