When the US last week added several units of BGI Group, a Chinese genetic sequencing firm, to its entity list restricting technology transfer, the primary justification was that the company had been “contributing to monitoring and surveillance”, including of ethnic minorities. Yet the human rights implications of China’s domestic surveillance state aren’t Washington’s only concern. The new regulations also state that BGI’s programmes of “collection and analysis of genetic data [present] a significant risk of diversion to China’s military”.
Biotechnology has quietly become America’s newest national security concern. From Congress to the intelligence agencies, Washington’s leaders have concluded that control over biotechnologies will be critical not only to the country’s health, but to national security as well.
Biotech tools have made rapid advances of late, enabling new therapies, vaccines, manufacturing techniques — and biosecurity risks. It’s long been recognised that DNA is just a complex type of code, telling cells how to operate. Gene-editing technologies have become more precise and vastly cheaper, making it easier than ever to “reprogramme” organisms. In addition, more powerful computing capabilities have provided new clarity into the meaning of DNA’s “code”.
One use of these capabilities is for manufacturing. For centuries, humans have relied on micro-organisms to produce beer and yoghurt, but with the right reprogramming, bacteria can be made to produce many new types of chemicals. In 2010, Darpa, the Pentagon’s long-range R&D arm, launched a programme called Living Foundries, aiming to synthetically manufacture 1,000 molecules….
This author of Chip War keeping us on our toes re new competition coming down the track. There’s a new US national security obsession — biotech via @FT
https://t.co/tZrtlkHK9r— George Magnus (@georgemagnus1) March 7, 2023