Blood Feud

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Talk about a good premise for a biomedical thriller: villagers in a poor Chinese province are used as guinea pigs by an American university collecting genetic material. That's how the story was played last week in China. The Xinhua news agency reported that trusting villagers in Anhui province had blood and other fluid samples taken during a research project headed by Harvard University—but weren't told why.

In fact, last week's story recycled four-year-old allegations that caused Harvard to suspend its research into hereditary links in a range of diseases. Since the program ended in 1998, four separate inquiries by both Chinese and American review boards have cleared Harvard (and two cooperating Chinese universities) of wrongdoing, save a few minor procedural lapses. A Chinese scientist from the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) who looked into the case also found no evidence of malpractice; all the peasants he spoke to said they gave informed consent.

Why is China fanning an old, seemingly dead controversy? Timing has a lot to do with it; Harvard scientists were preparing to restart the project. Xenophobia from China's old-guard establishment is a factor too. According to another scientist at CASS who has closely followed the case: "There are some senior leaders in the government who are unhappy about international institutes doing research in China." In nationalistic China, politics trump science any day.