Why 500,000 Britons including my wife who signed up to this medical research trial MUST leave it now, writes DR MARTIN SCURR

Why 500,000 Britons including my wife who signed up to this medical research trial MUST leave it now, writes DR MARTIN SCURR By DR MARTIN SCURR Published: 06:52 EDT, 22 April 2025 | Updated: 06:54 EDT, 22 April 2025 e-mail View comments Not long after I met my wife Rachel, she told me that since 2006 she’d been signed up to an organisation called UK Biobank – a large-scale research resource aimed at improving the nation’s health courtesy of the medical information provided by willing volunteers. ‘It was the right thing to do,’ she told me. ‘It contributes to scientific research that ultimately can only help us all.

’ It’s why, despite greatly disliking the invasive process of having her blood taken, Rachel has provided samples each time the firm asked. Two years ago, she received a request from Biobank to undergo an MRI – a more prolonged and unpleasant procedure. She dreaded the claustrophobia she would feel inside the scanner, but I urged her to go ahead with it, as I believed in the scientific cause which it was for.



So you can imagine the incandescent sense of betrayal we feel now, learning that this sensitive medical data harvested from my wife and half a million citizens like her is now at the mercy of the Chinese state. That one in five successful applications to access this data have come from research institutions based in China seems a deplorable breach of national security. Certainly, MI5 is concerned enough to warn that these apparently innocuous facilities can be compelled by the Communist regime ‘to carry out work on their behalf’.

Former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove has been just as frustrated. Last week he said: ‘We should be significantly concerned. Why on earth do we allow this strategic data into the hands of a Chinese company? There’s no way that the Chinese would let us into their country to conduct this sort of business.

’ Rachel feels furious and let down. In fact, I have barely seen her so upset. ‘I thought I was doing a good thing for the world, but it seems instead that I was incredibly naive,’ she told me.

We have unwittingly handed over a rich fund of epidemiological data without the remotest idea of China’s intentions They are sentiments I share, alongside guilt for encouraging her to provide yet more data. And I suspect that every other person who has submitted samples to UK Biobank over its 19 years of operation feels the same. I do not trust the Chinese Communist Party any more than the British Government, which in 2020 announced it would dismantle telecoms giant Huawei’s involvement in our 5G network, due to ‘national security concerns’.

Five years on, and the Government has wrestled control of yet more national infrastructure from the grip of China in the form of the Scunthorpe steelworks. Its Chinese owner, Jingye Group, was about to run the plant into the ground, and with it the future of virgin steel making in this country – not a comfortable position to be in when the UK is about to embark on years of increased defence spending and rearmament . But as a doctor, no mention of the Chinese government can take place without invoking the spectre of the Covid-19 virus that caused 20million excess deaths worldwide .

It seems probable that the virus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan – funded in part by the US – and that the Chinese government repeatedly lied to us about that provenance. What we don’t know is why the virus had been engineered in the first place , other than that Beijing certainly seems keen on biological disease research. Could it have been designed to act as a biological weapon? Orwellian though this may sound, it is a question that has disturbing resonance now.

For why, in a country of 1.4billion people that is one of the most centralised societies in the world, under the thumb of a sophisticated and repressive state apparatus, is China short of medical data? What value does it place in the genomes, tissue samples, questionnaire responses and GP records from 500,000 UK citizens? We have unwittingly handed over a rich fund of epidemiological data without the remotest idea of China’s intentions. This was not the original intention of the UK Biobank project.

When it was established in 2006, its purpose was to provide insights that in time could enable scientists to better treat disease. Back then, a repository of DNA, along with health records that examined risk factors such as weight and cholesterol and enabled a deeper understanding of how individuals experience illness, could only be a good thing. Nicely worded letters from UK Biobank would drop on the doormat, politely asking if Rachel would undergo this test or that.

The service felt personal. UK Biobank is led by Sir Rory Collins, British Heart Foundation Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford Yet we have heard nothing from the firm over its damning collaboration with Chinese institutions. Instead, an explanation is given on its website, where Professor Sir Rory Collins, UK Biobank’s chief executive, doesn’t mention the word ‘China’ once in his response.

He said: ‘We follow Government guidance on who can use UK Biobank and have robust processes for secure access to the data that are supported by the Government and our funders.’ On the same webpage, UK Biobank said: ‘Since 2012 we have been sharing the de-identified health and lifestyle data of our volunteers with approved international researchers who are seeking to improve public health. Over 15,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers have been published as a result.

’ They are right that personal details such as names and dates of birth are stripped from UK Biobank data before it is shared, a fail-safe that seemed satisfactory enough in 2006. But we live in an age of extraordinary technological advances, and it is not beyond imagination that artificial intelligence can scrape this treasure trove of data to pinpoint genetic biomarkers that separate, say, Jewish people from Afro-Caribbeans or Caucasians. Read More My husband's Viagra has stopped working.

.. it is a sign something's wrong: DR SCURR has the answer The potential consequences of that are almost too chilling to contemplate.

China, remember, is more than an economic rival. Were it to invade Taiwan and drag Britain into a war in the South China Sea, we would be first and foremost an enemy of Beijing. The occasional Novichok poisoning on British soil – as was carried out by the Kremlin in 2018 in Salisbury, resulting in the death of Dawn Sturgess, a mother of three – would be a mere prelude to the biological havoc that China could wreak against citizens here.

And UK Biobank is willingly selling the blueprint of such an attack to Chinese laboratories. That alone should be enough for the firm to urgently backtrack on its plans – or more pertinently for our Government to force it to. While on paper it is a non-profit charity, it receives funding from the Government and was established by a collaboration between, among others, the UK Department of Health.

That means they have a responsibility to step in. If they care about our national security – and indeed about the rights of those well-meaning volunteers who have given their DNA and their health profiles to UK Biobank over the years – then they must act decisively now. In the meantime, I urge every one of those volunteers to take note of a clause on the website’s small print: ‘You are free to withdraw at any time from the study without giving us a reason.

’ Quite how they prove you are no longer on a database I do not know, but I shall be urging Rachel to do so immediately – while hoping that it is not already too late. Beijing China Share or comment on this article: Why 500,000 Britons including my wife who signed up to this medical research trial MUST leave it now, writes DR MARTIN SCURR e-mail Add comment Comments 0 Share what you think No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards.

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