Marc Casper, for those unfamiliar, is the former chair of the Wesleyan board of trustees and is currently the chair of our finance committee. He is the single most influential person at Thermo Fisher Scientific, one of the world’s largest biomedical companies, with a valuation of $220 billion as of May 2024. Casper has been the president and CEO of Thermo Fisher since 2009, and was elected chairman of its board in 2020. It’s for this reason that Tibetan activists recently targeted him in a campaign for Thermo Fisher to stop selling their Huaxia PCR DNA tests to Chinese police forces in Tibet. To understand why Casper and Thermo Fisher are being described as complicit in genocide, it’s important to look back to 2012.

In 2012, Casper joined the US-China Business Council, a multinational organization that connects US business leaders with Chinese executives and government officials to encourage economic cooperation. In 2022, Casper gave People’s Republic of China (PRC) President Xi Jinping a standing ovation after his speech, a moment that he later shared with board members as a point of pride. It’s likely through this connection on the US-China Business Council that Thermo Fisher was contracted by the Ministry of Public Security to assist in analyzing the DNA of Uyghur, Tibetan, and Hui ethnic minorities, as they did in 2013. At the time, China was building a dragnet, a DNA database whose stated goal was to “comprehensively improve public security organs’ ability to solve [criminal] cases, and manage and control society.”

Activists say the database, alongside China’s other surveillance operations, could be used to find any Uyghurs who refuse to comply with social control measures such as internment. They often use the justification that this DNA database will assist police in forensic investigations, but human rights groups and researchers highlight that it is often simply used as a surveillance tactic.

Importantly, the way that China has collected this genetic data is extremely coercive. Through a program called “Physicals for All,” the Chinese government collected blood samples and stored DNA data from nearly every person in the Xinjiang and Tibet regions of China. According to Uyghurs in the area, authorities told them that these medical checkups were required. Collecting people’s DNA without their free consent, let alone storing it indefinitely, is a flagrant violation of medical ethics, as noted by the Forensic Genetics Policy Initiative. 

Thermo Fisher has sold the Chinese government testing kits that are specifically tailored to their mass DNA collection efforts. The Huaxia PCR amplification kit is designed to effectively identify genetic information from Uyghur, Tibetan, and Hui individuals. According to the New York Times, A Thermo Fisher researcher indicated in a 2017 talk (no longer available online) that the company had specifically calibrated the test to look for those ethnic groups, and that the test was made at the request of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security—likely to assist surveillance efforts in the campaign to intern and oppress the Uyghur people.

As the Australian Strategic Policy Institute points out, Thermo Fisher has claimed that they cannot be held responsible for how their products are used, yet in promotional materials for Chinese markets, they have publicly highlighted their role in the development of the national DNA database.

In 2019, due to pressure from lawmakers and human rights groups, Thermo Fisher announced that it would stop selling these tests to Xinjiang police. While this move was initially lauded, they continued to sell these tests to other police forces within China—resulting in these tests continuing to show up in Xinjiang.

In Xinjiang, and especially in Uyghur internment camps, the Chinese government has perpetrated a variety of human rights abuses. These include forced labor, religious suppression, political indoctrination, forced contraception, forced abortion, mass detention, torture, compulsory sterilization, organized mass rape, sexual torture, and forced cohabitation. Additionally, Amnesty International reported that nearly every single person who was subjected to internment was forced to take a DNA test.

“[W]e went to a police station for what I think was a DNA [sample],” one detainee is quoted as saying in the same Amnesty international report. “They took our blood, spread it on something, and put it in a plastic wrap.” 

On March 10, 2024, Uyghur researcher and activist Maisam Mitalipova testified in front of the Congressional-Executive Committee on China, suggesting that an explanation for China’s intense genetic monitoring of Uyghur people could be the facilitation of an immensely profitable organ harvesting industry. Her argument begins by asking why, if these people are being entered into internment camps where their every move is tracked and it’s nearly impossible for them to commit any crimes, their DNA would need to be entered into a database to assist with forensic investigation. It’s not to assist in treating disease; there’s been extensive reporting on the awful conditions that people are subjected to, and on the many who die due to mistreated disease and infection in the camps. Therefore, Mitalipova suggests, the only plausible reason for this expensive and invasive DNA testing practice is to match victims to beneficiaries for organ harvesting. 

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long murdered prisoners of conscience for their organs. Ethan Gutmann, a human rights reporter, has extensively reported on the killing of Falun Gong practitioners in China for this purpose. He returned to Xinjiang in 2020 to further investigate organ harvesting. 

“Every year, about 2.5 to 5 percent of healthy individuals in the camps simply disappear in the middle of the night,” Gutmann said in a 2020 Haaretz article. “On average, they’re 28 [years old]—Beijing’s preferred age for harvesting.” 

He estimated that the CCP murders 25,000 people per year, and believes their organs are harvested and given to wealthy Chinese in need. 

In her testimony, Mitalipova argues that Thermo Fisher’s current operations in China seem consistent with a large volume of organ transplants. 

“Thermo Fisher’s involvement in forced organ harvesting in Xinjiang is undeniable,” Matalipova said. “The company [is] very successfully selling HLA kits and other custom-made DNA profiling products for organ transplantation as high as in [the] ten million range.”

If Gutmann’s claim that organ harvesting is still occurring in Xinjiang is true, then Thermo Fisher would not only be complicit in facilitating social control over Uyghurs through the Huaxia PCR tests, but they would also be actively profiting off of testing performed on people who are now in internment camps. From 2016 to 2024, the years Casper has served on the Wesleyan board of trustees, and the same years for which Huaxia PCR amplification tests have been sold to police in China, his net worth has more than tripled. 

At the March 3, 2024 meeting of the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) General Assembly, when President Michael Roth ’78 was questioned by students about Thermo Fisher’s involvement in the Uyghur genocide, he was unusually defensive. First, he dodged answering the question by claiming that students were asking for “no Chinese students or language” at Wesleyan. Then, he deflected by saying that “Thermo Fisher saved your asses during COVID.” Finally, he lied to my face by claiming he didn’t know Marc Casper and Xi Jinping had a relationship. Even after a point of information disproved that they had no relationship, he attempted to ridicule the claim by saying, “You may think that Casper and Xi Jinping had a sleepover.” At no point did he acknowledge the harm that Thermo Fisher and Marc Casper caused in Xinjiang, or express any sort of sympathy for the more than one million people that Casper is complicit in or directly responsible for being placed in concentration camps. 

This experience forced me to question why Roth was defensive, especially with his history as a public, independent, thought-focused academic. The company Wesleyan would have contracted with to create a “partner campus” in China is a Chinese corporate group named the Hengdian group. One of their subsidiaries, Apeloa International, is a biotechnology company that interfaces with Thermo Fisher, regularly attending the same conferences and business events in China. For me, it’s hard to believe that we found a relationship with a Chinese biotechnology company without the help of the biotechnology CEO with a presence in China on our board of trustees. Additionally, Wesleyan had an exchange program with Fudan University in China until the COVID-19 pandemic. Fudan University also has an intimate relationship with Thermo Fisher, which sponsors scholarships there. Fudan University ranks fourth in the world for biomedical engineering, a field in which Thermo Fisher excels. Again, I find it hard to believe that we made this connection without the help of Marc Casper. 

This is not to say that Wesleyan shouldn’t have a presence in China; by all means, we should. International students and perspectives offered by exchange programs are some of the greatest assets to a liberal arts campus with resources like ours. By no means should the actions of a government, especially an authoritarian one, reflect onto the young people of that nation, and Wesleyan should work to find programs that can increase our presence abroad. However, I am arguing that our relationship with China should not be predicated on the ethnic cleansing and genocide of a historically marginalized group. Wesleyan’s influence is Thermo Fisher’s influence, and Thermo Fisher has influence in China because they facilitated the Uyghur genocide and assisted in creating the largest DNA biometric surveillance database on the planet. 

To me, this explains Roth’s reaction to being questioned about Casper’s complicity in the Uyghur genocide at the March 3 GA meeting. It also explains why he lied to our faces when pressed on this issue: I believe he doesn’t want us to know about these connections. Wesleyan has two courses of action. We can listen to the words of Thermo Fisher and Marc Casper, and believe the claim that there’s no way that Thermo Fisher can keep track of how all their products are used. We can listen to Thermo Fisher, who says that they don’t sell these tests to police forces in Xinjiang and Tibet anymore. We can listen to the Chinese government, who claim that organ harvesting is a practice that has long been outlawed, and who say that their DNA database is for helping their police in forensic investigations. 

We could also listen to The New York Times, the Australian Strategic Policy Initiative, Human Rights Watch, Radio Free Asia, the Congressional-Executive Committee on China, human rights group Amnesty International, the Inter-parliamentary Alliance on China, and the many Tibetan rights organizations including Free Tibet and the Tibet Rights Collective, when they say that Thermo Fisher is both complicit in and actively facilitating the forced collection of genetic data, which constitutes a human rights abuse. We can believe these groups and sources when they highlight how Thermo Fisher has helped the Chinese Ministry of Public Security develop the technology to identify people’s ethnicity through DNA testing, and when they say that DNA tests and the database they’ve created have increased racial profiling and helped the Chinese government imprison and intern those who it considers dangerous. We can also listen to the testimony of Maya Mitalipova, a genetics expert and Uyghur rights activist, and the work of human rights researcher and reporter Ethan Gutmann, when they say that Thermo Fisher is actively profiting from a reprehensible practice of organ harvesting, all in service of making sure that China’s wealthiest citizens have access to the organs they need. We can also listen to Human Rights Watch’s updated statement on Thermo Fisher, in which they say that the move to stop selling these tests to Tibetan and Xinjiang police is not enough, since they still sell the same tests to other provinces in China, likely the reason these tests keep showing up in Xinjiang.

In short, we can listen to the Wesleyan Connection, which describes Casper as “focus[ed] on creating a cycle of positive change,” while thanking him for his 25 million-dollar donation. Or we can listen to Tibetan activists, who describe him as someone who has “Tibetan and Uyghur blood on his hands.” I, for one, will listen to the latter. I call on Roth to ask Casper to resign. 

Miles Horner is a member of the class of 2026 and can be reached at mhorner@wesleyan.edu.