A new front is opening in the intensifying economic and diplomatic competition between the United States and China: human DNA.
“I think we’re just seeing the leading edge of it,” retired Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, told the Washington Examiner. “Everybody knows that we ought not to be sharing technical data on hypersonics, directed energy, things like that. This is one of those things that people haven’t thought of.”
They’re thinking about it now. FBI officials are wary of letting scientists with ties to the Chinese government study the DNA data that American researchers use to develop cutting-edge medicines. Their skepticism has prompted a pair of top Republican senators to probe whether the Department of Health and Human Services is giving an unintentional boost to China’s genetic research industry at the expense of U.S. economic and national security.
“China can already compel the genetic information of over a billion of its own people,” Sen. Marco Rubio told the Washington Examiner. “And if it can acquire — through companies it controls or through cyber theft — genetic information on millions more, [the risk] can range from unfair advantage in the development of life-altering cures to … the creation of biological agents that only harm people of a certain genetic makeup.”
The idea of biological weapons uniquely suited to kill Americans “sounds like something out of science fiction,” the Florida Republican acknowledged. But he’s not the only one thinking along those lines. “I’m not an expert on genetic medicine, but I can tell you that people that are experts on biological warfare say that it is a futuristic possibility that you could design biological agents that only harm people of a certain genetic makeup,” he said.
The Russian government wants to study genetic information to develop “the so-called genetic passport of a soldier,” as one of Moscow’s top scientists put it recently. Military officials hope to identify “genetic predispositions” and train their forces accordingly. China’s Communist authorities are already collecting DNA data on a massive scale, using genetic information to tighten surveillance on Uighur Muslims, a repressed ethnic and religious minority. And last year, a Chinese doctor aided the birth of “the world’s first known gene-edited babies,” an operation that drew international condemnation because he had modified the DNA in their embryos “to try making them resistant to their father’s HIV infection,” as the Wall Street Journal explained.
It’s theoretically possible to combine those concepts “to make people super-soldiers,” according to Spoehr, a former commandant at the Army’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear School. If researchers can identify parts of DNA that make some people better athletes than others, for example, and it’s possible — though widely condemned as unethical — to edit DNA to encourage or suppress certain qualities, governments around the world might consider “engineering biological weapons” and soldiers to resist their effects.
“Even in a nerve gas situation, you expose a population to nerve gas, some people are more predisposed to death,” Spoehr told the Washington Examiner. “I have to believe that some of that is genetic. And so you can probably engineer the genes so that they produce different quantities of enzymes which more quickly metabolize nerve agents.”
A top agent at the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate raised the specter of such weapons two years ago, warning a congressional commission that China had “gained significant access to U.S. genomic data and biological samples,” which put Beijing well on its way to possessing “the largest, most diverse dataset ever compiled.”
“There is a theoretical risk that the U.S. may become marginalized in the global pharmaceutical market and cede the lead in innovation in the burgeoning and dynamic biological-cyber realm,” supervisory Special Agent Edward You told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. “This could have significant implications on the U.S. at the level of the individual, the economy, for biodefense, and overall national security.”
That testimony resurfaced in a recent report from the in-house watchdog at the Department of Health and Human Services, which prompted Rubio and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa to call for an investigation into whether “genomics companies with ties to the Chinese government” are drawing revenue from Medicare and Medicaid. They don’t want U.S. taxpayers to subsidize Chinese research, even in pursuit of medical advances.
“Genomic data is also the next phase of breakthrough medicines via gene therapy/editing,” a Senate Republican aide told the Washington Examiner. “If China has cures to cancers or Alzheimer’s, it could give them leverage in larger issues. We’ve seen them use this strategy in the ongoing tariff debates, since we’re dependent on China for many traditional drugs.”
The lawmakers are especially concerned about whether federal money went to a pair of “for-profit companies from China” — WuXi Nextcode Genomics and Shenzhen BGI Technology Company — that have partnered with Huawei, the telecommunications giant that U.S. officials regard as an international platform for Beijing’s spy agencies, to store their data.
“[Huawei] is the same company that the U.S. recently charged with conspiring to defraud our nation and stealing trade secrets, among other crimes,” they wrote to Health and Human Services acting inspector general Joanne Chiedi. “WuXi and BGI’s U.S.-based partnerships give them unique access to genomic data, including Americans’ genomic data. Therefore, it is particularly alarming that these two companies have partnered with Huawei.”
Both companies maintain that the concerns are misplaced. WuXi argued that the senators mislabeled them a Chinese company, given their U.S. headquarters and the diversity of their shareholders and top executives. BGI stressed that scientific progress requires international cooperation, adding that the company’s affiliates “strictly abide by local laws and regulations” and honor contractual obligations.
That might not be good enough to reassure federal officials who are growing allergic to cooperation with China.
“They present the most comprehensive threat the U.S. has faced, probably in our history,” Rubio told the Washington Examiner. “With a government that sees all of these industries as national champions and not as participants in a free marketplace, it’s difficult to envision what you can share on.”
