Tag Archive for: biotechnology

US cuts to science and technology could fast-track China’s tech dominance

Is the United States now trying to lose the technology race with China? It certainly seems to be.

The race is tight, and now the Trump administration is slashing funding for the three national institutions that have underpinned science and technology (S&T) and what advantage the US still has.

China is outpacing the US in the volume of high-impact research in 57 of the 64 critical technologies in ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker. The US’s main remaining advantage is downstream in implementing technology, and even that’s at risk as China’s significant S&T investments pay off.

Now the US’s lead may disappear even faster following cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) and National Science Foundation (NSF).

The NIH is the biggest public funder of biomedical research worldwide and impacts global health in ways often taken for granted. For example, it supported the foundational work that led to the Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine which, by some estimates, prevented 1.2 million infant deaths between 2000 and 2015. NASA is a stalwart of space research and inadvertently has contributed to medical innovations as it has attended to the health of its astronauts, such as the ear thermometer. The NSF funds all non-medical scientific research (biology, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, space and advanced materials) in the US and manages major research facilities.

The NIH stands to lose $4 billion out of the $32 billion already allocated to US research grants in 2024. This $4 billion cut is not just 11.4 percent of the NIH’s research grants; it will also limit its ability to cover indirect costs associated with equipment, maintenance, safety and personnel—everything that keeps world-class research facilities ticking.

According to The New York Times, indirect costs make up 29 percent of grant funds on average. With only 85 out of 613 institutions having indirect costs below 15 percent, a decision to cap indirect costs at 15 percent will at least halve the funds for maintaining labs for most NIH grant recipients.

If you are a grand-slam-winning tennis champion, these indirect costs are akin to the payments for your team of coaches, strategists, medical entourage, all your equipment and access to training facilities. Without these, you won’t stay at number one. It’s the same in the critical technology race.

Typically, labs and other research facilities have state-of-the-art equipment, which have indirect costs commensurate with their level of sophistication. This means that high-level labs—where breakthroughs often happen—have more to lose when funding is cut for indirect costs.

The biggest losers in these cuts will be top US universities, medical schools and hospitals, many of which are among the top 10 institutions in the Tech Tracker for biotechnologies, including MD Anderson Cancer Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering and many teaching hospitals within the Harvard Medical School. The NIH not only provides research funding in the biomedical fields; it also has 27 biomedical research institutions. The NIH combined is currently ranked second for vaccines and medical countermeasures and eighth for genetic engineering in the Critical Technology Tracker, highlighting its global importance and competitiveness.

NIH-funded research has contributed to early detection and prevention of cancers, chemotherapy and immunotherapy. The NIH also helped develop vaccines for flu and RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus), as well as the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine. These are the very institutions that the US government will rely on to develop the future vaccines needed to protect Americans from the next global pandemic.

In addition, in early February, biomedical research was again in the firing line with termination letters sent to hundreds of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the NIH. More job cuts are expected to follow, further weakening the sector.

Around the same time, the NSF froze all grant review processes to comply with new directives to end all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. According to the Washington Post, NSF staff were tasked with scrutinising active research grants—preciously approved by peer review—with a list of keywords including ‘women’, ‘diverse’ and ‘institutional’ to reverse any grants remotely related to DEI initiatives.

On 18 February, the haemorrhage of US S&T talent continued with a 10 percent cut to the NSF workforce. Given the NSF’s annual budget of $9 billion, the effect of this cut will be felt across all technologies. The Computer Research Association, for example, predicts devastating consequences for scientific innovation and talent in AI technologies and high performance computing, as the NSF funds 80 percent of fundamental computing research at US institutions. The association credits foundational US technologies behind AI, cybersecurity and quantum technologies to NSF funding.

The Critical Technology Tracker ranks the US first in quantum computing, with seven of the top 10 institutions based in the US. However, quantum technologies are priority areas for China, which unveiled its most advanced quantum computer, a 504-Qubit Superconductor, in December 2024. In 2022, the NSF’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships was set up to accelerate the implementation of NSF-funded discoveries from research to new industries, especially in technologies where the US faced the greatest competition. According to Reuters, the directorate lost 20 percent of its staff last week.

Similarly, NASA, currently ranked first in space launch systems research in the Tech Tracker, may face a 10 percent cut to its specialised workforce. These massive cuts have been put on hold, but if they resume, the loss of talent would be a blow to an important component of the technological race, especially with a worldwide shortage of tech specialists. Historically, US space and satellite companies have benefited from NASA’s decades-long public investments in research and development.

The Economist reported that the scrutiny of DEI programs extended to keywords related to climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA are therefore expecting major job cuts for their work in climate science and extreme weather patterns. The NOAA plays an important role in weather prediction. Its research on space and sensors is visible in the Tech Tracker across the areas of small satellites, gravitational sensors, and sonar and acoustic sensors.

While the US is cutting its funding, China continues its systematic, long-term investment in critical technologies. Synthetic biology is a sector in which China has the largest lead in the Tech Tracker. Over the past 5 years, China has published 57.7 percent of high-impact research in the field, while the US has produced just 13.1 percent.

Synthetic biology is the design and building of new biological systems. It has applications in many areas, such as agriculture and medicine, which directly affect food security and health. Like quantum computing, synthetic biology is an emerging technology where scientific innovation and intellectual property ownership can determine future industry dominance. Since 2006, China has prioritised synthetic biology and built a tech ecosystem around this emerging technology, comprising research institutes and industry.

As Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist from Stanford University, pointed out, the research infrastructure that China has built to support its all-of-nation approach to emerging biotechnology is now the envy of the world. The contrast between China’s investment strategy and the cuts imposed on the NIH could not be starker.

If the US doesn’t want to lose the S&T race with China, it must review its funding cuts. Reducing the funding envelope to grants organisations that oversee scientific grants, such as the NIH and NSF, will stifle the scientific innovations and breakthroughs that have been central to the rise of the US as a technology superpower.

Countries that have long relied on US technological research may need to step up spending on scientific research, or they, too, will risk being left behind.

AI, bioterrorism and the urgent need for Australian action

Today, you’d have to be a top-notch scientist to create a pathogen. Experts worry that, within a few years, AI will put that capability into the hands of tens of thousands of people. Without a new approach to regulation, the risk of bioterrorism and lab leaks will soar.

The US acted a year ago to reduce that risk. With the return of President Trump and his commitment to repeal important executive orders, it’s time for Australia to take action.

The key action, adopted in an executive order signed by President Biden, is to control not the AI but the supply of the genetic material that would be needed for the design of pathogens.

Biosafety regulation of Australian laboratories needs tightening, too.

When the genome for variola, the virus that causes smallpox, was published in 1994, the capacity to use that information malevolently had not yet evolved. But it soon did. By 2002, ‘mail-order’ DNA could be used to synthesise poliovirus. In 2018, researchers manufactured horsepox using mail-order DNA. Today, the market for synthetic DNA is large and growing.

Both generative AI, such as chatbots, and narrow AI designed for the pharmaceutical industry are on track to make it possible for many more people to develop pathogens. In one study, researchers used in reverse a pharmaceutical AI system that had been designed to find new treatments. They instead asked it to find new pathogens. It invented 40,000 potentially lethal molecules in six hours. The lead author remarked how easy this had been, suggesting someone with basic skills and access to public data could replicate the study in a weekend.

In another study, a chatbot recommended four potential pandemic pathogens, explained how they could be made from synthetic DNA ordered online and provided the names of DNA synthesis companies unlikely to screen orders. The chatbot’s safeguards didn’t prevent it from sharing dangerous knowledge.

President Biden was alert to risks at the intersection of AI and biotechnology. His Executive Order on AI Safety attracted attention in tech circles, but it also took action on biosafety. Section 4.4 directed departments to create a framework to screen synthetic DNA to ensure that suppliers didn’t produce sequences that could threaten US national security.

Before Biden’s executive order, experts estimated that about 20 percent of manufactured DNA evaded safety screening. Now, all DNA manufacturers have obligations to screen orders going to the US and to comply with obligations to know their customers.

With President Trump committing to repeal the executive order, it’s imperative that other countries impose equivalent requirements to sustain a global norm of DNA safety screening. While Australia has yet to act, a fix would be relatively straightforward. The minister for agriculture, Julie Collins, and the minister for health, Mark Butler, already jointly administer a regime governing the importation of synthetic DNA into Australia.

Updating those regulations in line with the US’s approach is a no-brainer. Prospective synthetic pandemics have profound security implications. A designed pathogen could have features unseen in naturally evolved viruses. Those features could include both a high reproduction rate and high lethality. A pandemic caused by such a pathogen could cause widespread absenteeism, leading to such blows as the collapse of the power grid and other critical infrastructure.

Lab leaks are also a growing risk. The intersection of AI and biotechnology increases the risk of accidents. Experts assess that lab leaks have already overtaken natural spillover as the most likely cause of the next pandemic.

While the origin of coronavirus that causes Covid-19 remains unknown and contested, we know that lab leaks occur frequently. The original SARS virus escaped from labs at least three times. A 2021 study reported 71 high-risk human-caused pathogen exposure events between 1975 and 2016, and data collected via an anonymous survey on biosecurity in Belgium reported almost 100 laboratory-acquired infections in five years.

Tighter regulations and regular inspections improve biosafety. In the US, more tightly regulated ‘select agent’ laboratories exhibited a 6.5-fold lower accidental infection rate than other labs. In Australia, the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator is responsible for lab regulation and oversight. Australia is a significant player, with four of the approximately 51 known labs classified as level-4. Level-4 facilities hold terrifying viruses such as ebola, marburg and nipah.

The regulator is required to, and does, inspect those labs only once every three years for recertification. (It also does a few inspections to confirm compliance with specific licenses.) Bridging the three-year gaps, the labs submit annual reports of inspections by experts whom they appoint. We need to look at tightening this regimen, particularly by increasing the frequency of inspections by the regulator.

The concerns with Australia’s current approach aren’t limited to inspections. The guidelines for Australia’s level-4 facilities were last updated in 2007. Australian Standard 1324.1 is used to specify the level of filtration for exhausts from such facilities. AS1324.1 was functionally superseded in 2016 by ISO16890 because AS1324.1 overestimates the effectiveness of HEPA filters by about half.