Genetic records from more than 20,000 children in the United States, collected to understand how young brains grow and how environment shapes health, have been repurposed by extremists to prop up a discredited vision of biological “race.” The breach of trust exposes a gap between the lofty ethics of modern genomics and the messy reality of how data can leak, circulate and be twisted into propaganda. I see in this episode not just a failure of security, but a warning about how fragile public confidence in science becomes when children’s DNA is used to advance an ideological agenda.
The story centers on a landmark government-backed project that set out to follow kids over years, mapping how genes, neighborhoods, schools and screens interact. Instead of remaining a guarded resource for legitimate research, some of that genetic information slipped into the hands of people determined to revive “race science,” the long-debunked claim that humanity can be carved into fixed biological hierarchies. The fallout now reaches from federal agencies to university labs and online communities that trade in pseudo-genetic charts of human worth.
How a children’s brain study became a genomic gold mine
The genetic trove at the heart of this controversy traces back to the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development project, better known as the ABCD Study. Designed as a national ABCD cohort, it recruited families so researchers could watch children grow from late childhood into adulthood, tracking how biology and experience shape mental health, learning and behavior. The project was ambitious by design, enrolling nearly 12,000 participants and building a dense archive of brain scans, questionnaires and DNA. Parents were told their children’s information would be carefully protected and used to answer questions about development, not to fuel culture wars.
Federal health agencies promoted the project as a model of open yet responsible science, highlighting its status as a long-term longitudinal study that would follow the same children for years. The National Institute on Drug Abuse described how television segments, including a CBS feature on “60 Minutes, showcased the project as a public good, complete with an Image of kids climbing into MRI scanners. That visibility helped normalize the idea that children’s brains and genomes could be studied at scale, but it also underscored the responsibility on the National Institutes of Health to keep the most sensitive data out of the wrong hands.
Where the safeguards failed
Despite that promise, more than 20,000 children’s genetic records linked to brain research ended up circulating far beyond the controlled repositories where they were supposed to stay. Reporting on the breach describes how Genetic Data From 20,000 U.S. children, gathered under the umbrella of brain science, was ultimately used by people intent on arguing for the intellectual superiority of white people. The National Institutes of Health, which oversaw access to these files, is described as having “failed to protect brain s…” in a way that allowed extremists to download and repurpose the information.
There has been no official public accounting of how the data slipped out, who approved access, or which safeguards broke down. One investigation notes that There has been no clear explanation from the agency about how its controls failed, even as the material was used to advance an ideological agenda. Another account points out that, as of Jan, internal reviews had not produced a public timeline of the breach or a list of corrective steps. The Chronicle is cited in that reporting as one of the first to flag how the children’s genetic information had been used to advance an ideological agenda, underscoring how long the gap has been between discovery and accountability.
How extremists weaponized a scientific dataset
Once outside tightly managed repositories, the children’s DNA did not sit idle on a server. It was folded into a broader ecosystem of public genomic resources that are routinely mined by people trying to resurrect typological ideas of race. A recent analysis of human genomics warns that Public genomic datasets like the 1000 Genomes project, the Human Genome Diversity Project and HGDP, along with the Adolescent Brain Cogn resources, are routinely re-sorted into crude clusters that are then labeled as purported human racial groups. In that typological framework, complex patterns of ancestry and environment are flattened into color-coded maps that extremists present as proof that some populations are inherently smarter or more disciplined than others.
The children’s brain data fit neatly into this pattern because it linked DNA to cognitive tests and brain imaging, a combination that is irresistible to people chasing genetic explanations for social inequality. In online forums and fringe publications, advocates of “race realism” have long cherry-picked from large dataset projects, stripping away caveats about environment, discrimination and measurement bias. By plugging the children’s sequences into that machinery, they could claim that brain structure and test scores confirmed their worldview, even though mainstream geneticists have repeatedly rejected such interpretations as scientifically invalid and ethically abhorrent.
The scientific case against “race science”
What makes this misuse particularly corrosive is that it runs directly against the consensus of modern genetics. Population studies show that human variation does not fall into neat racial boxes, and that most genetic diversity lies within, not between, socially defined groups. As one public health scientist, There is abundant evidence that variations within ethnic groups far exceeds those between them, a point emphasized by Michael, whose work on race and genetics has been cited widely. That reality makes it impossible to rank “races” by intelligence or moral worth using DNA, no matter how sophisticated the statistical tools appear.
Recognizing the danger, scientific bodies have urged researchers to move away from treating race as a biological category at all. A major report on genetics and society argued that using racial labels in genomic work often obscures the real drivers of health disparities, such as access to care, pollution and structural discrimination. The authors described their recommendations as Maggie Bartlett reported, “a pathway to generate lasting change in an evolving field,” and warned that the harms of racism and injustice were often overlooked when race was treated as a genetic variable. That guidance sits in stark contrast to the way extremists seized on the children’s data, treating race as destiny and ignoring the social context that shapes every outcome the ABCD Study set out to measure.
Rebuilding trust in children’s research
For families who enrolled their kids in the ABCD Study, the revelation that extremists have been poring over their children’s DNA is not an abstract ethics seminar. It is a breach of a promise that their participation would serve public health, not white nationalist talking points. The National Institutes of Health now faces a dual task: tightening technical controls so that sensitive files cannot be quietly copied, and confronting the cultural reality that any large trove of genetic information will be a target for people chasing “Race Science” narratives. That means revisiting how access is granted, how audits are conducted and how quickly the agency alerts the public when something goes wrong, rather than leaving parents to learn from investigative reporting that Children Misused for ideological projects were supposed to be protected by federal safeguards.
I also see a broader lesson for the genomics community. Large-scale projects like The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study are invaluable for understanding how early-life stress, addiction risk and mental illness unfold, but they exist in a world where Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and online extremists alike are eager to revive biological notions of race. As one critic of tech culture noted, some companies are already flirting with genetic scoring tools that echo the logic of Race Science, even as mainstream researchers insist that such ideas are scientifically bankrupt. If public institutions want parents to keep volunteering their children for long-term brain and genetics research, they will have to show, in concrete policy and transparent oversight, that they understand the stakes and are willing to confront not only data thieves, but the ideologies waiting to exploit any crack in the system.
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