The New Manhattan Project

Biotechnology is the next frontier, and China seems to understand that better than America does.

In 1942, when America launched the Manhattan Project, it assembled the best minds of the age behind a single, world-altering goal: to harness atomic power before Nazi Germany could. The project was secretive, urgent and in the end, decisive. Today, a new race is underway - not for the atom, but for the code of life itself. And this time, it is China, not America, that seems most determined to win.

The implications are vast. A report from America’s National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology spells out the danger with clinical precision. Biotechnology is becoming the foundation of military, economic and technological power. Biology, long the domain of academic obscurity, is being fused with artificial intelligence to create weapons, cures, crops and capabilities once relegated to science fiction. Whoever leads in this domain, the Commission warns, will shape the future of geopolitics. Right now, that leader looks likely to be China.

The stakes are arguably higher than before, encompassing not just weapons systems, but the fundamental building blocks of human health and capability.

China’s ambitions in biotechnology are no secret. As early as 2017, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared biotechnology a ‘priority frontier’ in its national strategy. It has since poured billions into synthetic biology, gene editing and precision medicine. Its doctrine of “Military-Civil Fusion” ensures that civilian biotech breakthroughs can be swiftly commandeered for military use. The result is a system in which no clear line separates cancer research from battlefield enhancement. Such blurred boundaries recall the Soviet Union’s Cold War practice of embedding military applications into every scientific frontier.

The Commission paints a picture that would be comic if it were not so chilling: a future in which China fields genetically engineered soldiers, augmented by machine intelligence, in ways that make drone swarms look quaint. America’s disarray stands in sharp contrast. Its once-commanding lead in biotechnology, built on decades of public investment and private innovation, is now imperilled by political paralysis, funding cuts and bureaucratic drift.

History offers a cautionary tale. Britain, after inventing the steam engine and the spinning jenny, frittered away its early technological lead through complacency. The United States risks making the same mistake with biotechnology.

The report notes that China is not simply innovating but also manipulating markets in familiar ways. Through state support and aggressive pricing, Chinese firms have undercut competitors abroad, forcing closures and consolidations. It is a playbook borrowed from semiconductors, rare earths and solar panels and one that Western policymakers despite repeated warnings have proven slow to counter.

India offers a glimpse of how such tactics unfold. In 2022, it slapped anti-dumping duties on Chinese pharmaceutical ingredients to protect its fledgling biotech sector. Few others have been so bold. America’s biotech supply chains remain dangerously reliant on Chinese firms. One need only recall the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when mask shortages exposed the fragility of American medical logistics to imagine the consequences of similar dependencies in far more critical biotechnologies. In a future biological crisis, supply chain vulnerability could mean the difference between resilience and capitulation.

The Commission thus advocates not merely investment, but protection: a $15bn surge into biotechnology over five years, a new national office to coordinate efforts, tighter controls on Chinese access to research, and the rapid expansion of allied supply chains.

Of course, such measures will not come cheap. Nor will they be universally popular. Free-market purists will bristle at industrial policy; libertarians will balk at restrictions on academic exchange. But the uncomfortable truth is that biology, like physics in the 1940s, has become a theatre of power politics.

China appears to have learned the lesson of the Manhattan Project that in a world of transformational technology, the first mover wins and often writes the rules. If America wants to avoid becoming a client state in a biopolitical order shaped in Beijing, it must relearn the art of urgency.