US hawks put their egos before people’s health

Jensen Huang, cofounder, president and CEO of Nvidia, declared recently “the technology divide has been completely closed” in computing, and identified biology as the next frontier of scientific and technological endeavors.

Washington agrees, viewing bioscience and biotechnology as a critical battlefield for maintaining US leadership, and Beijing sees them as crucial for its technological independence. With both governments highlighting the national security implications of biotechnologies, it is only to be expected that the two countries’ competition in this area will only get ever fiercer.

Should politicization of this competition go to the extreme, however, as has happened with other frontier technologies, the potential damage may far outweigh all the anticipated benefits.

Some people in the US Congress are actually pushing for tough restrictions on Chinese biotech industry leaders. A number of Congress members are trying to shut out Chinese companies. Accusing four Chinese companies of ties with the military, they are calling for denying them access to any federally-funded undertakings. These companies have constructive working relations with their US partners, but are now labeled “foreign adversary biotech companies of concern” and risk being blacklisted by the US.

All of a sudden, the once mutually beneficial relations they have cultivated in the US market have become a threat to US national security thanks to the opportunistic jingoism of some China hawks.

Despite the companies’ clarifications and the Chinese embassy’s protests against “ideological bias”, there is no chance the companies will escape the crosshairs unscathed. Because, as Mike Gallagher, chair of the House Select Committee on competition with China, made very clear, for the armchair warriors in Washington this is “not just a supply chain battle or a national security battle or an economic security battle; I would submit it’s a moral and ethical battle”.

It is a battle that Gallagher said the US can’t afford to lose, because who wins the competition will set the rules of the road. For Gallagher and his ilk, their self-set mission is to ensure it is the US that does that, if not by fair means by foul.

But as Abigail Coplin, a Vassar College researcher, has cautioned, US policymakers getting fixated on the technology’s potential military applications are doing so at the cost of hindering efforts to cure disease and feed the world’s population.

Rachel King, CEO of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the world’s largest biotech trade association, has also warned corresponding legislation would “do untold damage to the drug development supply chain both for treatments currently approved and on market as well as for development pipelines decades in the making”.

There is nothing new about the no-holds-barred attack on competitors to US companies in an emerging industry. It is basically a rinse-and-repeat of what the US did to Japan back in the day. But as Thomas Bollyky, the Bloomberg chair in global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, pointed out, what’s concerning about the politicized attack on biotech companies is “we’re talking about human health”.